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Understanding Awe

Awe
  • Is a crucial and foundational human experience
  • About our relationship to the vast mysteries of life
  • Immediate, fleeting, powerful, uninvited, involuntary
  • One of the most craved human experiences
  • Marvels the mind
  • Evokes a ‘sense of place’ with compulsion to linger, commit to memory and recreate the experience
  • Is experienced as a fusion and spontaneous overflow of contrasting feelings:
    • Pleasure and fear
    • Humbled and elated
    • Profound and euphoric
    • Puzzles apprehension and appreciative wonder
  • Transforms and transcends us, interconnecting us to the world around us
  • Makes you feel small, insignificant and humble
  • Shifts awareness from self, to caring for others
  • Alters our perception of time and timelessness
  • Is experienced in the presence of something greater than the individual
  • Is external to the individual (object or event) and outside of their control
  • Requires being open to participating in the encounter

The most cited definition of awe is “an emotion in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear and that the stimulus is vast and that it requires accommodation” (Keltner & Hardt, 2003 p.297).

In 2023, Keltner defined awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world”.

The origins of awe trace it back to the Old Norse and Icelandic words of agi, aghe, ege and aegilegur with meanings of terror or dread relating to mystical or divine beings. Fear is still associated with awe, though overall the valence of awe is classified as positive, aesthetic or self- transcendent.

Collated from the following references:

Abrahamson, 2014; Bai et al., 2017; Bonner & Friedman, 2011; Gerber, 2002; Halstead & Halstead, 2004;  Keltner, 2023; Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Kristjansson, 2016; Lee, 1994; McShane, 2018; Piff et. al., 2015; Reed, 1989; Rudd et al., 2012; Schneider, 2011; Silvia et. al., 2015; Ulrich & Wagemann, 2018; Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012; van Elk, et al., 2016; Weger & Wagemann, 2021; and Wettstein, 1997.

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Full reference list available here.