The Awe Experience

What is it like to experience awe?

Getty Images | Maria Korneeva

Awe is a wonderfully unifying spiritual experience. As my close colleague and friend David Yaden put it, the awe state is the “everyperson’s spiritual experience”. Regardless of religious belief, we can all witness something with reverence (and even a tinge of fear). But what does awe actually feel like?

According to the seminal 2003 paper by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, awe involves an encounter with something so vast that is urges us to alter our very understanding of the world and our place in it. Ever since that seminal 2003 paper, researchers have found additional qualities of awe, which we put into a scale we called the Awe Experience Scale (you can take the test for free here). To create the scale we had people describe a moment they experienced awe and we looked to see which qualities were most related to their awe experience. We settled on 6 main qualities of awe, and the initial scale had 30 items.

In a new paper led by Marianna Graziosi, we shortened the scale to only include 12 items. Here are the 6 qualities of awe and the two items per sub scale of our shortened Awe Experience Scale:

1. Altered time perception

“I noticed time slowing.”

“I sensed tings monetarily slow down.”

2. Self-diminishment

“I felt that my sense of self was diminished.”

“I experienced a reduced sense of self.”

3. Connectedness

“I experienced a sense of oneness with all things.”

“I felt a sense of communion with all living things.”

4. Vastness

“I perceived something that was much larger than me.”

“I felt the presence of greatness.”

5. Physical sensations

“I had goosebumps.”

“I gasped.”

6. Need for accommodation

“I felt challenged to understand the experience.”

“I found it hard to comprehend the experience in full.”

                                                           Outcomes of Awe

We found a number of very interesting associations with the awe experience.

For one, we found that the use of psychedelics increased a sense of awe. Throughout multiple studies, we asked people to reflect on their psychedelic experiences. We found that connection with the world and vastness were associated with mystical experiences and a sense of life’s preciousness. Interestingly, these two facets of awe— connection with the world and vastness— were also associated with increased life satisfaction and a sense that one’s life is “psychologically rich.”

In the past I have defended the psychologically rich life, which is different than a life of happiness or a life of meaning. A psychological rich life involves complex mental engagement, a wide range of deep, intense emotions, and diverse, novel, and interesting experiences.

Interestingly, the self-loss and accommodation facets of the awe experience were associated with reports of more challenging life experiences such as fear, grief, physical distress, insanity, isolation, death, and paranoia. This is interesting and suggests that the self-loss and accommodation facets of awe may be reflecting the fearful and disorienting nature of challenging life experiences.

Challenging life experiences often require a rethinking of what we thought was true, and even the most challenging experiences can induce a sense of awe as we try to figure it all out. Also, such experiences can sometimes lead to post-traumatic growth. In my view, a deeper examination of awe as a bridge between challenging life experiences and post-traumatic growth could be a really cool future area of research.

Limitations

Of course this study has some limitations, such as the reliance on the use of recalling psychedelic experience to elicit the awe experience. Future studies should certainly look at the awe experience during a psychedelic experience to better assess the nature of the experience. Also, more research needs to be conducted on this shortened scale in non-psychedelic populations to better generalize about the nature of the awe experience.

Future research should also explore awe in cross-cultural settings where self-transcendent experiences may differ in prevalence. For example, recent research found that fear was more likely to be involved in the awe experience in a Chinese sample vs. a U.S. sample (where awe was more characterized by positive emotions).

Conclusion

We hope our shortened scale of the Awe Experience can encourage more researchers to study this profoundly important and long neglected experience and can hopefully lead to interventions to help all people experience this fundamentally human self-transcendent experience.