The Emotion of Awe

I have run into a distinct internal state more than a few times now, a recurrent emotional landscape that I have learned to recognize. It is called the emotion of awe, and it has been on the academic radar for a little more than 20 years.

It carries a precise physical signature: distinct combination of facial expressions, autonomic nervous system shifts, respiratory interruptions, and long-term biological markers that, according to the main researchers on awe, it sets it apart from other emotions.

Though the somatic response is remarkably consistent, the catalysts are radically diverse. Awe arrives with equal potency through diverse human experiences: breathtaking natural scenery, the grace of moral beauty, the rhythm of collective effervescence, or the boundary-dissolving stillness of standing at the thresholds of birth and death.

I encounter this emotional state in the presence of rugged mountain ranges, in the silent depth of temperate forests, and before artwork that slips beneath my ability to understand it. I feel it in libraries. But I also experience it among family and friends, while walking alone and I get stunned by the unexpected, or even under the sheer, sudden weight of an unsurprising platitude. It arises indiscriminately across joy and sorrow.

In these moments where the emotion of awe takes over, I pause to taste the feeling, lacking both the desire and the ability to dissect it into neat, comfortable categories.

Several of these encounters have become defining milestones in my life. One occurred the night I told my mother I was leaving Italy for Venezuela, the very night my sister was in the hospital giving birth to my niece, the first child of the next generation.

As I hugged my mother, a sudden realization crystallized within me: the decision was made, and there was no going back. Tears filled my eyes, not from simple sadness, but from an inability to process the sheer density of what was unfolding in real time.

Another instance occurred during a solo Transatlantic passage. On a flawless ocean night, surrounded by thousand-mile horizons, I experienced a sensation that the universe and I were moving in unison. It placed my life choices in sudden perspective, confirming a quiet, deep-seated sense that my trajectory was moving in direction with existence, and that there was no other possible path than the one I was on.

The Science and Philosophy of Awe

Psychology broadly categorizes these encounters as the emotion of awe, a term rooted in Old English and Old Norse denoting dread or reverence, historically directed toward the divine.

I first engaged with the formal psychology of awe while preparing a lecture on Positive Psychology, seeking a framework to bridge the personal narrative of my career and life change with academic theory. In their foundational 2003 paper, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt conceptualized awe through two core criteria: perceived vastness and the need for cognitive accommodation.

In their model, when we encounter a stimulus so immense, whether physically, conceptually, or morally, that it exceeds our existing mental filing system, our cognitive structures are forced to adapt. The experience arrests us, momentarily overwhelming our habitual mental models. This brings forth what researchers call the small self effect: our egoic boundaries recede in response to a reality far larger than our personal narratives.

While pure awe is often marked by chills and breathlessness, these moments frequently blend with an adjacent emotional state known in affective science as Kama Muta (literally, “being moved by love”). Characterized by tears and warmth in the chest, this state emerges when vastness intersects with deep social or existential connection.

Awe refuses to fit cleanly into a traditional binary of positive or negative emotion; it is a complex, mixed-valence state. It is no accident that the same root yields both awful and awesome.

In his 2023 work Awe, Keltner describes this mixed valence during the passing of his brother, Rolf:

“Watching Rolf pass, I felt small. Quiet. Humble. Pure. The boundaries that separated me from the outside world faded. I felt surrounded by something vast and warm. My mind was open, curious, aware, wondering.”

Despite a lot of effort to define it precisely, the emotion of awe is intertwined with other concepts that historically attempted to describe the same or similar phenomena. This landscape links to several major philosophical and psychological traditions:

• The Sublime: As articulated by Edmund Burke (1757) and Immanuel Kant (1790)—and empirically linked to awe by Clewis, Yaden, and Chirico (2021)—the sublime is an encounter with the infinite or majestic that highlights human physical insignificance while simultaneously elevating the mind.
• The Oceanic Feeling: Coined by writer Romain Rolland in correspondence with Sigmund Freud, describing an indissoluble bond with the external world. Freud acknowledged Romain’s idea, but declared he was unable to experience it and thus proceeded to skeptically attribute it to early psychological regression as he writes in his book Civilization and Its Discontens, published in 1929.
• Peak Experiences: Abraham Maslow’s description of rare moments of intense self-actualization and fulfillment, where time, space, and egoic tension temporarily vanish.

This is but a short list of ideas that share similar conceptual principal with the emotion of awe. All these formulations share a common thread: the moment the distracted ego steps aside, allowing for unmediated participation in existence.

A Tear in the Predictive Fabric

Personally, I see awe as fundamentally an act of co-emergence, a spark struck between an external event and an internal state. In this state, the rigid borders of the self dissolve, pulling us out of internal chatter and replacing self-centered narratives with a much larger perceptual field.

Although some recurrences have been observed in research, no single stimuli can 100% elicit awe in a subject. It is always a two side equation where the external and the internal meet. In my case I can say that I experienced often the situations I described during my Atlantic Crossing, yet it was one single night, one peculiar moment that elicited awe, while all the other moments, in all similar, were not as awe-striking.

There may be reasons for this. We could not survive in a state of continuous awe; it would collapse into perceptual overload. The brain relies on predictive processing, an efficient neurological prediction engine that minimizes surprise by flattening the world into expected, manageable patterns. Most of our lives are governed by these necessary, automated routines that keep daily existence stable. The experience of Awe is a formidable threat to a well-oiled predictive process.

However, an over-calibrated life can become mechanical, endlessly replicating expectations while ignoring the unscripted reality humming just beyond our attention.

Herein lies the vital function of awe: it is a sudden tear in the predictive fabric of reality. Like an unexpected squall on a clear horizon, it violently recalibrates our attention back to the present. Awe interrupts our semi-automated narratives, forcing a fundamental question to the surface: How am I truly relating to this moment?

The Internal Compass

Contemporary researchers think that awe function as a catalyst for psychological and physiological recalibration, though the exact boundaries of these effects remain open to debate. The small self effect could be emerging as a response to the dampening of the activity in the Default Mode Network, temporarily softening the hyper-vigilant ego. From this shift, scientists infer a cascade of downstream benefits, suggesting it may expand our subjective perception of time, enhance cognitive flexibility, and encourage prosocial behavior.

Affective science tends to frame the emotion of awe as a plausible evolutionary mechanism, an adaptive nudge designed to quit internal chatter, loosen egoic boundaries, and tentatively restore our felt alignment with a larger whole.

Confronting stimuli that are so perceptually, conceptually, or morally vast often breaks our baseline frameworks, forcing us to recalibrate to fit a larger reality.

I have come to see that these moments are not mere emotional flickers; they serve as a diagnostic signal. Over time, this realization has matured into a steady internal orientation, or maybe a compass calibration, metaphorically speaking.

When awe takes hold, when I am paused in silence, tears and hair rising from an overwhelming sense of gravity and presence, it signals an alignment with the circumstance I am witnessing.

It does not provide objective logical proof that a specific decision is right, but it confirms that I am fully present, attuned, and engaged with the weight of my own existence; it’s a reminder that what is happening right in front of me is worth attention, and that there is a larger life out there I often fail to consider and grasp.

References

• Keltner & Haidt (2003): Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition & Emotion, 17(2), 297–316.
• Keltner (2023): Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Penguin Press.
• Clewis, Yaden, & Chirico (2021): TY – JOUR Clewis, Robert, Yaden, David, Chirico, Alice 2021/02/25, Intersections Between Awe and the Sublime: A Preliminary Empirical Study, Empirical Studies of the Arts
• Kama Muta (Fiske et al., 2019): Zickfeld, J. H., Schubert, T. W., Seibt, B., & Fiske, A. P. (2019). Moving through the literature: What is the emotion often denoted being moved? Emotion Review, 11(2), 123–139.
• Freud & Rolland (1927/1930): Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. (Address to Romain Rolland’s 1927 correspondence regarding the “oceanic” feeling).