Definition, Words, & Psychology Research

And yet, all of us are inexplicably drawn to moments that take us out of routine. Moments of (often delightful) surprise; moments we can’t fully understand or explain; moments that, in retrospect, we might even identify as turning points in our lives. These moments may not come often, but they are striking when they do. They jolt us out of routine, make us question our world; they change us. Many of these are moments of awe. So let’s learn about the phenomenon known as awe.
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Awe is both a temporary state of being and a “complex” emotion (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). It is the feeling of experiencing something larger than yourself, something that is difficult to integrate into your current understanding of the world (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Yaden et al., 2017).
 
We can access awe through thinking and through perceiving (Yaden et al., 2017). What’s the difference? I’ll give you two examples from my own life. When I stood in the Sistine Chapel and took that ceiling in, the sheer scale and artistic vision of Michelangelo’s work left me in a state of awe. I simply could not imagine how a human being had conceived of and executed such a beautiful vision.

Experiences of awe
For me, the experience of coming to believe in a higher power was a moment of awe that came simply from thinking. I had not previously been a person of faith before. When I had the inner experience of starting to believe in God, nothing changed in my environment, but my understanding of the world changed profoundly, and I was in awe of the new world I saw.
 
Experiences of awe have several other features in common (Yaden et al., 2019). When we experience awe, we realize or perceive something far larger than ourselves. This makes us feel smaller than we usually do, but also more connected to the world or the people around us. Awe also comes with physical sensations, such as chills, goosebumps, pleasure, or trepidation. And for many people, an experience of awe features changes in how they perceive time in that moment.
 
Since experiences of awe are so memorable, it is a concept that we use often. (Perhaps too often – when was the last time you called something “awesome”? Did that awesome thing actually overwhelm your senses and change your understanding of the world?) Here are some common examples of how we use the word awe.
 
1.     What Does It Mean To Be Awe Inspired? To be awe-inspired means to be driven to action by the experience of awe. Many a scientist has been motivated by a moment of awe in their work, just like many a hiker has been inspired to return to the mountains, or climb an even higher one, by a soaring mountain vista.

2.     What Does It Mean To Be In Awe? To be in awe is to be actively experiencing awe. Given the true nature of awe, we might overuse this statement as well. But the colloquial use of this term is true to the meaning of the word: when you are in awe of somebody’s decision, for example, it might be because you can’t fully understand how courageous, cowardly, or thoughtful they are being.
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3.     What Does It Mean To Be Awe Struck? A key component of true experiences of awe, as noted above, is that of struggling to fully comprehend the experience. In this sense, moments of awe can leave us dumbfounded, unsure of what to do next.

Psychology researchers agree that awe is an emotion (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Yaden et al., 2017). Awe differs from almost all other emotions, however, in that it can contain both pleasant and unpleasant emotional feelings (Gordon et al., 2017; Keltner & Haidt, 2003).

Here’s an example of this dual role of awe. Growing up, I was fortunate to go to summer camp in New Hampshire. The sight of the sun setting across the lake often left me in a state of (pleasant) awe. The sight of a sudden thunderstorm sweeping across the lake towards me as I sat in a small sailboat, on the other hand, filled me with (unpleasant, almost frightening) awe. In fact, psychologists believe that awe may have started as a more negative and fearful emotion (Keltner & Haidt, 2003) that arose in response to things we could not understand but knew were threatening (Gordon et al., 2017).
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The shared thread in these unpleasant and pleasant experiences, though, is that awe is a destabilizing and transcendent experience (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Yaden et al., 2017). Just like all emotions, awe drives us toward an action – in this case, the need to accommodate our previous understanding of the world to the new experience we have just had (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).

I’m sure you can recall examples of awe from your own life. I’ll share a couple more, in order to highlight the characteristics of the experience that make it an “awe”-ful one. (These experiences will be far more memorable than my puns, I promise.)
 
As a therapist, I am often in awe of the human capacity to love and to forgive. When a betrayed partner sticks with their spouse after an affair, or when a person who is desperately afraid to feel finally embraces vulnerability, I am in awe of the strength, resiliency, and growth potential of humankind. Therapy continually makes me readjust my understanding of how much people can change. (And on the darker side of things, sometimes I am in awe of how callous, cruel, and self-centered people can be, too.)
 
Experiences of awe often have a social element, too. Many years ago, I attended a New Year’s Eve performance by Phish in New York City. Hearing the band play as confetti rained down on us and thousands and thousands of fans rang in the new year – that filled me with awe. I had never felt so connected to other people on such a scale; it was an entirely new kind of group experience for me.
 
Another experience that commonly features awe is when people consume psychedelic substances. The changes in time perception, feelings of oneness with the world, and deep insights about the nature of the world that frequently characterize psychedelic journeys all contribute to our feelings of awe when we are “tripping”. At especially high doses of psychedelics, some people even report a loss of their own consciousness – an extreme example of the diminished sense of self that is characteristic of awe (Yaden et al., 2017).
 
If you’re struggling to identify situations in which you’ve felt awe, don’t worry – psychology researchers are here to help. When we perceive threat, beauty, virtue, exceptional ability, or the supernatural – these are often times we experience awe as well (Keltner & Haidt, 2010). So if any of these things have ever sent a shiver down your spine, given you the chills, or filled you with a happiness you didn’t quite understand, you might have been experiencing awe (Shiota et al., 2007).

• “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.” – Albert Einstein.
  
• “Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.” – Neil Armstrong
  
• “I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.” – Gerry Spence
  
• “Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” – Immanuel Kant
  
• “Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.” – William James
  
• “There’s no way we can possibly understand anything. But we can see things, we can perceive things, and we can wonder. We can just be in a world of awe and wonder. That’s the best we can do.” – Frederick Lenz
  

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.

To keep learning, here are some books to explore:​​

• ​Anderson, C. L., Dixson, D. D., Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2020). Are awe-prone people more curious? The relationship between dispositional awe, curiosity, and academic outcomes. Journal of Personality, 88, 762-779.
• Gordon, A. M., Stellar, J. E., Anderson, C. L., McNeil, G. D., Loew, D., & Keltner, D. (2017). The dark side of the sublime: Distinguishing a threat-based variant of awe. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 310–328.
• Guan, F., Chen, J., Chen, O., Liu, L, & Zha, Y. (2019). Awe and prosocial tendency. Current Psychology, 38, 1033-1041.
• Hendricks, P. S. (2018). Awe: a putative mechanism underlying the effects of classic psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. International Review of Psychiatry, 30(4), 331-342.
• Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition & Emotion, 17(2), 297–314.
• Kok, B. E., Coffey, K. A., Cohn, M. A., Catalino, L. I., Vacharkulksemsuk, T., Algoe, S. B., . . . Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone. Psychological Science, 24, 1123–1132.
• Krause, N., & Hayward, R. D. (2015). Assessing whether practical wisdom and awe of God are associated with life satisfaction. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 7(1), 51.
• Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883.
• Pilgrim, L., Norris, J. I., & Hackathorn, J. (2017). Music is awesome: influences of emotion, personality, and preference on experienced awe. Journal of Consumer Behavior, 16, 442-451.
• Razavi, P., Zhang, J. W., Hekiert, D., Yoo, S. H., & Howell, R. T. (2016). Cross-cultural similarities and differences in the experience of awe. Emotion, 16(8), 1097-1101.
• Shiota, M., Campos, B., & Keltner, D. (2003). The faces of positive emotion: prototype displays of awe, amusement, and pride. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1000, 296-299.
• Shiota, M., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self‐concept. Cognition and Emotion, 21(5), 944–963.
• Sturm, V. E., Datta, S., Roy, A. R. K., Sible, I. J., Kosik, E. L., …, & Keltner, D. (2022). Big smile, small self: awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults. Emotion, 22(5), 1044-1058.
• Van Cappellen, P., & Saroglou, V. (2012). Awe activates religious and spiritual feelings and behavioral intentions. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 4(3), 223.
• Yaden, D. B., Haidt, J., Hood, R. W., Jr., Vago, D. R., & Newberg, A. B. (2017). The varieties of self-transcendent experience. Review of General Psychology, 21, 143–160.
• Yaden, D. B., Kaufman, S. B., Hyde, E., Chirico, A., Gaggioli, A., Zhang, J. W., & Keltner, D. (2019). The development of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S): a multifactorial measure for a complex emotion. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 14(4), 474-488.
• Yang, Y., Yang, Z., Bao, T., Liu, Y., & Passmore, H.-A. (2016). Elicited awe decreases aggression. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 10(e11), 1–13.