Awe: Definition, Words, & Psychology Research

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph. D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Awe is one of our most powerful – but rarely experienced – emotions. This article will help you understand the power of awe and how to increase its presence in your life.
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We live most of our lives in routine. Routine is comforting, isn’t it? Sunday brunch with your friends, your morning run, and the goodnight texts you exchange with your long-distance partner. As human beings – and really, all beings are this way – routine helps us stay mentally and physically regulated. If your life was completely unpredictable from one day to the next, you’d probably get stressed out pretty fast.​​
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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What Is Awe? (A Definition)

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.

Is Awe an Emotion?

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).

Opposite of Awe

The opposite of awe is the routine, the mundane, the things we take for granted. Consider the difference between your typical daily commute and a commute in which, after a heavy rain, you see a double rainbow, stretching for miles across the landscape. You probably remember little to nothing about the typical drive home, but the day with the double rainbow sticks with you. Living life on autopilot, without any experiences that challenge your understanding of the world – that is the opposite of awe.

Examples of Awe

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).

Awe in Psychology (Research Insights)

A lot of what we’ve already discussed about awe comes from psychology research. But thankfully, there’s more! Psychologists have done lots of fascinating work to better understand how awe operates in our lives.
 
One thread of research on awe concerns how it makes us behave towards others. There is lots of research to suggest that people who experience awe more often – but also those who are made to experience it in a laboratory setting – behave more positively and less aggressively toward other people (Piff et al., 2015; Yang et al., 2016). For example, after experiencing awe, we are more likely to volunteer to help others, or donate more money to a worthy cause (Guan et al., 2019). This might happen because while feeling awe, we experience ourselves as less important and feel closer to others (Shiota et al., 2007; Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012).
 
We also know that feelings of positive awe are good for us (Krause & Hayward, 2015), causing us to feel calmer, have more positive emotions, and (in a surprising pattern, given the nature of awe) to feel more in control of our lives (Kok et al., 2013). Also, we know that the experience of awe exists and looks relatively similar across cultures, although people in some cultures are more likely to experience awe than in other cultures (Razavi et al., 2016). This cross-cultural consistency is a good sign that awe is likely a universal emotion.
 
We also know a little bit about the personalities of people who experience awe more often. People who are more open to different experiences and curious by nature seem to have more experiences of awe (Anderson et al., 2020).
 
Finally, psychologists have studied how awe shows up in our facial expressions. When you are feeling awe, you probably raise your inner eyebrows, widen your eyes, lean your head forward slightly, and open your mouth slightly (Shiota et al., 2003). Interestingly, even though awe is usually experienced as a positive or pleasant emotion, it is rarely accompanied by smiling (Shiota et al., 2003).

Tips on Boosting Awe

By now you’re probably thinking, how can I get more awe in my life? While psychedelic experiences might be a pretty safe bet for accessing awe (Hendricks, 2018), I’m not going to recommend going to such extreme measures. To increase your odds of experiencing awe, you can do several things:
 
1)    Engage with art. Particularly if you are already feeling another emotion, listening to music or engaging with art in a similar way can provoke awe (Pilgrim et al., 2017).
2)    Get out in nature. Experiences of awe are especially common when we see and experience nature on a scale that defies our understanding, such as the vastness and depth of the ocean (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).
3)    Deepen your relationships. Personally speaking, many of my recent experiences of awe have come from deepening friendships and my awareness of my own feelings.

The Awe Walk

Another way to cultivate awe in your daily life is to take an “awe walk”. Immerse yourself in a space that is way larger than you – perhaps a forest, the shoreline of a lake, or some rolling fields. Before you go, and while you walk, read or listen to reminders to tune into the largeness of the world beyond yourself. If you are like the participants in one research study, you may find these walks increase your feelings of joy and positivity toward others; they might even make you smile more (Sturm et al., 2022).

Awe Quotes

  • “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

Articles Related to Awe

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

Books Related to Awe

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

Final Thoughts on Awe

I hope you are inspired to seek out more awe in your life, or to pay more attention to the opportunities you already have to experience awe. City skylines, the ocean, a mountain vista, a baby’s smile – chances to feel awe are more abundant than you might think. If you want more inspiration, I recommend watching the video below, where a very enthusiastic neuroscientist builds on what we’ve already discussed in this blog post.

How We Experience Awe — And Why It Matters

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