The role of self-transcendent emotions in psychedelic experiences: a two-process proposal

Psychedelic experiences share key features with the emotions of awe and being moved. Awe involves a reduced sense of self, a need to adjust one's understanding, and altered time perception; being moved involves feelings of insight, meaningfulness, and connectedness. These emotions may play an important role in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. A two-process model is proposed to explain how emotions contribute to therapeutic outcomes, and several testable hypotheses derived from the model are presented.

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Abstract

Psychedelics are known to elicit intense and meaningful subjective experiences. These subjective experiences are supposed to play a major role in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. However, not much attention has been paid to the role played by emotions in these experiences. In this paper, we argue that typical psychedelic-induced experiences share many phenomenological features with two emotions: awe (which involves a reduced sense of the self, need for cognitive accommodation, and alterations of temporal perception) and being moved (which involve feelings of insight, meaningfulness, and connectedness). On the basis of this comparison, we argue that these two emotions might play an important role in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and put forward a two-process model of the role of emotions in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Based on this model, we propose several testable hypotheses that can be derived from this model.