There is something wonderfully strange about a psychology study that finds part of its answer in the way people frame a selfie.
In 2020, a team led by Virginia Sturm at the University of California, San Francisco published a study in the journal Emotion that asked older adults to take a short outdoor walk at least once a week for eight weeks. Half received ordinary walking instructions. The other half were asked to look for awe: novelty, scale and things that made the world feel larger than their usual concerns.
The finding that stayed with me was visible in the photographs. As the study progressed, the people taking the awe walks occupied less of the frame and included more of the landscape. Their smiles also became more intense.
This is one study, not settled consensus. It does not show that 15 minutes outdoors will permanently change a person’s wellbeing. But its design gives us a surprisingly concrete way to think about attention. The participants were not instructed to make themselves less prominent in their pictures. They were asked to notice the world, and their cameras recorded a gradual change in what seemed worth including.
What the researchers actually asked people to do
The researchers recruited 60 healthy adults between 60 and 90 years old, then analysed 52 who completed the required measures and took at least two walks. Their median age was 75. Twenty-four joined the awe-walk group and 28 the control group.
Everyone was asked to walk outdoors for at least 15 minutes each week, alone and at a light to moderate pace. The awe group was encouraged to go somewhere new when possible and to approach familiar places with what the instructions called “fresh, childlike eyes”. They were told awe could be found almost anywhere, but was especially likely around physical vastness and novelty.
The control group walked too. This was not walking versus remaining indoors. It was a comparison between the same basic activity with and without a deliberate orientation towards wonder.
The walks generally exceeded 15 minutes. Unexpectedly, the control participants also walked more often, averaging 18.9 walks against 7.5 in the awe group. That makes the result difficult to explain as extra exercise alone.
How 1,184 selfies became behavioural data
Participants took three photographs of themselves during each walk, one before, one during and one afterwards. The 52 people included in the analysis submitted 1,184 photographs in total.
The phrase “smaller in the frame” was not merely an impression formed by looking through the camera roll. The researchers outlined each participant’s silhouette, converted each image into pixels representing “self” and “non-self”, and calculated the proportion of the photograph occupied by the person’s face and body.
Smile intensity was assessed separately. Coders certified in the Facial Action Coding System rated how strongly the corners of the mouth were pulled upwards, using a five-point scale. They were blind to the study’s aims, hypotheses and group assignments, and their ratings showed high reliability.
Across the eight weeks, the two groups followed significantly different trajectories. Compared with the control walkers, the awe walkers progressively occupied less of their photographs and showed stronger smiles. The published paper illustrated this change with week-one and week-eight photographs from two consenting participants, but the statistical result came from the full set of usable images over time.
The result was therefore not two dramatic before-and-after selfies, nor proof that everyone changed identically. It was a group-level pattern extracted from repeated photographs.
What a “small self” is, and what it is not
In ordinary speech, feeling small sounds like humiliation. In this literature, the “small self” means something narrower: a reduced sense that the individual and their immediate concerns occupy the centre of everything.
The idea predates this experiment. In 2015, Paul Piff and colleagues published five studies examining awe, the small self and prosocial behaviour. Across several settings, awe was associated with less emphasis on the individual self and more helping or generosity.
The photographic measure in Sturm’s study was an attempt to make that abstract idea visible. A selfie ordinarily establishes a simple hierarchy: the person is the subject and the place is the backdrop. On the awe walks, that hierarchy softened. The scenery was no longer merely proof of where the person had been. It occupied more of the image because, apparently, more of it felt relevant.
This connects with something I explored in an earlier article about the spotlight effect, our tendency to overestimate how closely other people are watching us. The awe-walk study approaches self-focus from another direction. Rather than arguing ourselves out of the spotlight, we sometimes meet something interesting enough that the spotlight matters less.
The emotional findings were real, but narrow
During their walks, the awe group reported greater increases in awe and joy, as well as positive emotions oriented towards other people, including compassion, admiration and appreciation. Their daily surveys outside the walking context also showed greater increases in socially oriented positive emotions and a steeper decline in reported distress than the control group.
Several broader measures did not change. The groups showed no difference in anxiety, depression or life satisfaction. Daily joy and awe outside the walks did not rise more in the awe group, nor did reported helping behaviour.
So a weekly awe walk did not make people happier in every measurable sense. The benefits were most visible during the walks and in particular daily emotional measures.
Silicon Canals has previously examined the broader evidence connecting awe with lower stress and compassion. What this smaller experiment adds is not a universal recipe for wellbeing. It is a controlled comparison suggesting that the quality of attention brought to a walk can matter above and beyond the walk itself.
Awe does not require a mountain
The word “awe” can make the exercise sound expensive, evoking mountains, cathedrals or eclipses. Yet participants were also told to notice leaves, shifting light, colour after rain and familiar streets approached as new.
One awe walker described autumn leaves that were no longer crunchy because rain had made the path soft and spongy. A control walker wrote about an upcoming holiday and the things that had to be done before leaving. The difference was not necessarily the beauty of the routes. Both groups rated their walks as similarly urban and similarly beautiful. The distinction lay in where attention went.
I live in Singapore, where it is easy for a walk to become a moving extension of the working day. Messages arrive, errands continue in the head, and the body covers distance while attention remains at a desk. Having a young daughter has reminded me that the same path can contain far more than an adult notices. A drain cover, an unfamiliar bird or rain gathering on a leaf can stop her completely.
That is why this study reminded me of what I wrote about happiness becoming something I notice rather than something I chase. I would not stretch the paper into a philosophy of life. The connection is simpler: attention determines how much of the available world reaches us.
The limits make the photographs more interesting
The sample was small, overwhelmingly white, highly educated and unusually healthy. It cannot tell us whether younger adults, people from different cultures or those facing substantial health difficulties would respond in the same way. The study was also designed to detect patterns of change over time, not every possible difference between groups. Larger replications could strengthen, weaken or complicate its findings.
Participants knew whether they had received the special awe instructions, even though they did not know what the other group had been told. Expectation therefore cannot be removed completely. And a selfie is not a transparent window into someone’s inner life. Framing can change because a person becomes more practised with a camera, finds a better view or understands what sort of photograph the exercise seems to invite.
Even with those cautions, I keep returning to the images. Not because taking up less space in a photograph is inherently virtuous, and not because a larger smile proves a transformed life. What interests me is that repeated attention appeared to alter composition without anyone being told to alter composition.
By the end of the study, the person had not disappeared. They were still there, and often smiling more. But the mountains, trees, buildings and sky had been allowed further into the picture.
That may be the most grounded way to understand awe. It does not erase the self or solve the concerns waiting at home. For a few minutes, it changes the scale. The world becomes larger, the self becomes one part of it, and the frame has room for both.
