Hagioptasia

A psychological account of why things sometimes feel extraordinarily special, enchanted, glamorous, sacred, nostalgic, or uncanny

What is hagioptasia?

Hagioptasia (hag-ee-op-TAY-zha) is a proposed perceptual process through which certain people, places, objects, memories or concepts come to feel extraordinarily significant or ‘special’. A distinctive feature is that the specialness can seem to belong to the thing itself — as though it were radiating from the person, place or object, rather than simply being recognised as a response occurring in one’s own mind.

This perceptual shift can be subtle or intense.
It underlies experiences often described as:

sacredness or spiritual atmosphere
awe or reverence
glamour and ‘iconic’ presence
artistic profundity
nostalgia and the sense of a ‘golden past’
spookiness, eeriness, and the uncanny

What links these experiences is not their emotional tone, but a shared underlying change in perception.

A familiar but unnamed experience

Many people recognise the experience once it is described. Whether these experiences are best understood as manifestations of a single psychological process, however, remains an empirical question.

It is present when:

a place from childhood seems to glow with remembered depth
an artwork or object feels as if it possesses an aura
an ordinary room takes on an uncanny atmosphere
a person appears unusually compelling or important
a landscape feels spiritually charged
something feels “off” or “wrong” though nothing obvious explains it

These impressions can be powerful, yet difficult to articulate.

Hagioptasia gives the experience a name and structure.

Where to start

If you’re new to the idea, these are good places to begin:

The short introduction — a concise overview of the mechanism
The phenomenology — how to recognise and identify hagioptasia
Examples — everyday cases from memory, art, religion, and the uncanny
A Conceptual and phenomenological argument for the discriminant validity of hagioptasia
Research background — theoretical foundations, empirical findings, and ongoing research
Why might hagioptasia exist? — speculations on its possible evolutionary origins

Why it matters

If hagioptasia is a genuine psychological process, it may help explain why certain people, places, objects, memories and concepts acquire an extraordinary sense of significance.

The distinction between something being meaningful to us and something seeming to possess a special quality of its own may be particularly important. The latter experience can influence attention, desire, memory and behaviour, even when we recognise that the perceived specialness is not an objective property of the stimulus.

Understanding this process may eventually help explain phenomena ranging from nostalgia and aesthetic experience to sacredness, glamour and the uncanny. But determining how far these apparently different experiences really share a common mechanism is one of the central questions for future research.

About the research

Hagioptasia was originally proposed by Daniel Laidler and subsequently developed in collaboration with psychologist John A. Johnson. In 2020, Johnson and Laidler published the first empirical study of hagioptasia in Personality and Individual Differences, offering preliminary support for the construct while identifying limitations in the original measure.

Research to date has been carried out by a single independent researcher, without institutional funding. The empirical picture is therefore still thin relative to what remains to be tested, leaving substantial scope for other researchers to contribute to an open research programme.

A construct-discrimination pilot study (Laidler, 2026) found hagioptasia to be the strongest predictor of externalised significance over salience, valence, and arousal, with preliminary evidence that it is also separable from nostalgia. Whether it can be similarly distinguished from awe, aesthetic sensitivity, curiosity/novelty, and status-related responses remains open, and is a priority for future research.

The evidence overall remains preliminary. Hagioptasia is best regarded as an ongoing hypothesis and research programme — one still in its early stages — rather than an established theory.