 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 Cal. I'm studying political economy and I am a combat veteran I went on two different deployments one in 09 and one in 2010 Like they were they were combat deployments 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 students 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 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 whitewater 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 like hiking or anything right now We use three different methods in this study. So we ask 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 and 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. There's a whole lot of fun The experience itself was just so touching and so much fun that it really it struck to me incredibly is very awesome I think it's really interesting that even though I spend a lot of time with with the other Cal veterans That normally we end up drinking we talk with we we nostalgic about combat. We talk about previous experience 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-traumatic 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 Going on the trip help 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 I can that can stick with me and help me in the future as I recover from my experiences