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.
Mystical experiences—marked by unity and self-loss—may not be rare and special; they may lie on a continuum with common, everyday experiences. In an exploratory study, participants described past experiences of unity and self-loss. Everyday unity experiences, often triggered by feeling part of a social group, shared many features of mystical experiences, including feelings of unity, insight, and the presence of meaning. Both types of experiences also involved social emotions. These preliminary results suggest that investigating the continuity between mystical and everyday experiences could help reveal the psychological mechanisms and evolutionary origins of mystical experiences.