War changes you by making you only follow orders and question nothing.
Experiencing awe changes us by making us wonder and question everything.
War makes you turn off your emotions.
Awe turns us on to new feelings.
War changes you by closing you off to the rest of the world.
Awe changes us by expanding our world and that can change everything.
My name is Jack Garner.
I'm a junior here at Calum.
I'm studying political economy and I'm a combat veteran.
I went on two different deployments, one in 2009 and one in 2010.
They were a combat deployment in South Afghanistan.
They definitely changed my life.
They changed my personality.
They affected a lot of how I interact with people, with the world.
And I actually got diagnosed with PTSD.
My name is Craig Anderson and I'm a sixth year PhD student in the social and personality
area in the psychology department.
I have specific interests in the emotion of awe.
Awe makes people curious about their physical and social environments.
You know, it's really hard to transition back.
It is.
Even though I say it was very smooth for me, I still had a lot of wall to dig through
so you can stomach all these interactions and stomach all this that happened.
We've tested if the curiosity that people feel while they're out in nature has downstream
social benefits.
We partnered with the Sierra Club who had a program of getting people out into nature
by going white water rafting.
Military veterans were a population that we had in mind that might especially benefit
from being in the outdoors.
I initially wasn't really sure how much fun I would have or if it affected me much.
I don't particularly seek out hiking or anything right now.
We use three different methods in this study.
So we asked about things like anxiety, how well people have been sleeping, how curious
they are, and then we followed up one week later.
We also collected saliva because the emotions that people feel are tightly related to physiological
processes.
And finally, we had GoPro cameras.
We go through the footage to code for things like emotion expression, working together
as a team.
You know, if somebody falls out of the raft who helps them get back in.
One of the most fascinating things I've seen is kind of the transformation over the day
where people lose that fear and are really enjoying themselves, playing with others,
getting in splash fights, jumping into the water and going swimming.
It's a lot of fun to watch.
I had a great time.
It was a whole lot of fun.
The experience itself was just so touching and so much fun that it really, it struck
me incredibly, is very awesome.
I think it's really interesting that even though I spend a lot of time with the other
Cal veterans, that normally we end up drinking, we talk, we nostalgic about combat, we talk
about previous experience in the military, and it's almost like we're stuck in it.
However, on this rafting trip, we ended up never talking about combat.
I feel like we're all really living in the moment, and it really felt like we were almost
moving on beyond our hang-ups.
The veterans a week after the rafting trip reported lower levels of post-femuratic stress
and also anxiety.
It's my hope that this research will help make it possible for people to get prescriptions
to get out into the outdoors, to help them with their physical, mental, and social health.
Rafting on the trip helped me kind of analyze my own feelings and able to bring them to
the surface, and I'm hoping that's going to be something that can stick with me and help
me in the future as I recover from my experiences.
