Awe

To map the experience of awe, I was fortunate to carry out the following study with my computationally minded collaborator Alan Cowen, a math prodigy well versed in new quantitative approaches to mapping the structures of human experience. Alan first scoured the internet, locating 2,100 emotionally rich GIFs, or two-to-three-second videos. The GIFs our participants viewed extended far beyond the images and videos relied on in the past to elicit Ekman’s six emotions, to include things like dog pratfalls, awkward social encounters, a moving speech by Martin Luther King Jr., delicious-looking food, couples kissing, scary images of hairy spiders, terrifying car crashes, rotting food, weird and transfixing geometric patterns, beautiful landscapes, baby and puppy faces, amusing mishaps of cats, parents hugging infants, dramatic storm clouds, and so on. After viewing each GIF, our participants rated their experience on more than fifty emotional terms, including, most germane to our present interests, awe, fear, horror, and beauty.

One day Alan dropped by my office with a data visualization of his results, which I present above. What in the world are we looking at? That’s what I first asked Alan. After detailing the new statistical analyses he derived to produce such an image, he explained that each letter refers to a GIF in our study, and each GIF is placed spatially in terms of which emotion it predominantly evoked. The overall distribution of emotions is called a semantic space. The streets of London have their maps, and so too do our emotional experiences.

You will notice right away how rich our emotional experience is; in this study, people felt twenty-seven distinct kinds of emotions. Many emotional experiences, this visualization reveals, are emotion blends, or mixtures of emotions, for example, of sadness and confusion, love and desire, or awe and horror. Emotional experience is complex.

Where does awe fall in this semantic space of emotion? Is it simply a kind of fear? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. As you can see, our feelings of awe, toward the bottom, are far away from fear, horror, and anxiety. This in part is what astonished me so in watching Rolf die: that despite the horrors of cancer and the profound losses in his leaving, the vastness of his passing and the mysteries it unearthed in my mind left me in awe.

Instead, feelings of awe are located near admiration, interest, and aesthetic appreciation, or feelings of beauty. Awe feels intrinsically good. Our experiences of awe, though, clearly differ from feelings of beauty. The GIFs evocative of the feelings of beauty were familiar, easier to understand, and more fitting with our expectations about our visual world—images of oceans, forests, flowers, and sunsets. The awe-inspiring GIFs were vast and mysterious—an endless river of cyclists in a road race; an undulating, spiraling swarm of birds; the time-lapsed changes of a star-filled sky in the desert; a video of flying through the Alps as seen through a bird’s-eye camera; a trippy immersion in Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

In subsequent mapping studies with similar methodologies, Alan and I documented other ways in which awe is distinct from fear, horror, and feelings of beauty (for relevant emotion maps, go to alancowen.com). The sounds we use to express awe with our voices sound different from our vocalizations of fear (and closer to vocalizations of emotions we experience when learning new things, like interest and realization). Our facial expressions of awe are easily differentiated from those of fear. The music and visual art that leads us to feel awe differs from that which evokes horror and beauty. Our experiences of awe take place in a space of their own, far away from fear and distinct from the familiar and pleasing feelings of beauty.

Everyday Awe

With stories from around the world and maps of emotional experience, we have begun to chart the what of awe. Perhaps, though, you have reservations. When we recall stories of awe—the core methodology of the twenty-six-culture study—we likely call to mind more extreme, once-in-a-lifetime experiences—saving a stranger’s life, being one of the millions at the festival of Guadalupe in Mexico City, visiting the Grand Canyon, watching a mother die. Artistic portrayals of what brings us awe—GIFs, music, paintings in our awe-mapping studies—are stylized and idealized representations. Neither method captures what awe is like in our daily lives—if there is even such a thing.