Yes, awe can be “associated with” psychosis-like experiences in some sensitive / vulnerable people, mostly because awe cranks up the exact mental knobs that psychosis also tends to exploit: uncertainty, pattern-finding, and agency detection.
Here’s the actual shape of it (annoyingly nuanced, like most brain things):
Awe increases agency detection and pattern perception. In experiments, awe made people more likely to perceive intentional patterns and endorse supernatural/agentic explanations, apparently via reduced tolerance for uncertainty.
If you’re already prone to aberrant salience or “everything feels meaningful,” awe can be gasoline on that vibe.
Psychosis exists on a continuum. Lots of people have transient psychotic-like experiences without a disorder, and whether it persists depends on vulnerability + environment/stressors.
Stress reactivity matters. In daily-life sampling work, people high in positive schizotypy show more psychotic-like/paranoid experiences, and stress can amplify that.
Awe isn’t “stress,” but overwhelming awe (especially if it’s fear-tinged) can be physiologically activating and destabilizing in a similar way for some nervous systems.
Meaning-making can slide into delusion-making. Emotions are deeply involved in psychosis and delusional experience, not just “weird beliefs in a vacuum.”
Awe is generally linked to prosociality, connectedness, perspective shift, and meaning in the ordinary-human range.
The problem is not awe. The problem is when your brain interprets awe as: “A hidden signal is selecting me personally.” That’s the “pattern-matching engine” doing donuts in the parking lot.
Awe is more likely to tip into psychosis-ish territory if it stacks with: