Awe

ONE EIGHT WONDERS OF LIFE An Awe Movement Begins

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.

• VIRGINIA WOOLF

The last time the word “awe” hit me with the force of personal epiphany, I was twenty-seven years old. I was in Paul Ekman’s living room, having just interviewed for a fellowship in his lab to study emotion. Ekman is well-known for his study of facial expression, and a founding figure in the new science of emotion. At the conclusion of his querying, we moved to the deck off his home in the San Francisco hills. We were embraced by a view of the city. Thick fog moved through the streets toward the Bay Bridge and eventually across the bay to Berkeley.

Stretching for conversation, I asked Paul what a young scholar might study. His answer was one word:

Awe.

At that time—1988—we knew very little scientifically about emotions: what they are, how they influence our minds and bodies, and why we experience them in the first place.

Psychological science was firmly entrenched in a “cognitive revolution.” Within this framework, every human experience, from moral condemnation to prejudice against people of color, originates in how our minds, like computer programs, process units of information in passionless ways. What was missing from this understanding of human nature was emotion. Passion. Gut feeling. What Scottish philosopher David Hume famously called the “master of reason,” and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, termed “System 1” thinking.

Emotions have long been viewed as “lower” and animalistic, disruptive of lofty reason, which is often considered humanity’s highest achievement. Emotions, so fleeting and subjective, others observed, cannot be measured in the lab. Our passions were still very much uncharted some seventy years after Virginia Woolf’s musing.

Ekman, though, would soon publish a paper—now the most widely cited in the field—that would push the scientific pendulum firmly toward emotion. In this essay, a field guide really, he detailed the what of emotions: They are brief feeling states accompanied by distinct thoughts, expressions, and physiology. Emotions are fleeting, shorter-lived than moods, like feeling blue, and emotional disorders, such as depression. He outlined how emotions work: they shift our thought and action to enable us to adapt to our present circumstances. To approach the why of emotions, Ekman took a cue from Charles Darwin: Emotions enable us to accomplish “fundamental life tasks,” such as fleeing peril, avoiding toxins, and finding nutritious food. Emotions are central to our individual survival and our evolution as a species.

A young science had a field guide, and scholars promptly went exploring. First, scientists mapped anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and joy, the emotions whose facial expressions Ekman had documented in the hills of New Guinea in the early 1960s. Next to appear in the lab were the self-conscious emotions—embarrassment, shame, and guilt. Studies charted how these states arise when we make social mistakes, and how blushes, head bows, awkward appeasing smiles, and apologies restore our standing in the eyes of others. Sensing that there is more to the mind, brain, and body than negative emotions, and more to the delights of life than “joy,” young scientists then turned to studies of states like amusement, gratitude, love, and pride. My own lab got into the act with studies of laughter, gratitude, love, desire, and sympathy.

An emotion revolution in reaction to the cognitive revolution was underway, moving psychological science beyond its dry and cool cognitivist account of the mind and inattention to the body. Neuroscientists were mapping “the emotional brain.” Studies alerted those interested in the secrets of love to the finding that marriages dissolve when partners express contempt to one another. Our culture wars over abortion, race, class, and climate crises could be traced back to gut feelings about the moral issues of our times. For faring well in life, emotion scientists determined that we are better served by cultivating our “emotional intelligence,” or EQ, than our IQ. Today we are still in the midst of “an age of emotion” in science, one that shapes every corner of our lives.

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