Within the depth-psychology corpus, awe occupies a threshold position: it is neither simply pleasurable nor merely fearful, but inhabits what Keltner and Haidt characterize as 'the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundaries of fear.' The literature approaches awe from at least three distinct vectors. First, the phenomenological-social tradition — most fully represented by Keltner — situates awe as a self-transcendent emotion that diminishes the bounded self, fosters prosocial motivation, and arises universally across cultures in response to nature, moral beauty, collective effervescence, and encounters with death. Second, a neuroscientific line, principally advanced by Schoeller, Jain, and collaborators, investigates the somatic correlate of awe — aesthetic chills, or piloerection — as a measurable index of peak emotional experience, reward circuitry activation, and what they term an 'emotional drift' in valence and arousal. Third, a personality-psychological strand, represented by Williams and Bannister, maps individual differences in awe-proneness onto openness to experience and aesthetic engagement, identifying warm, cold, and 'moving' chills as phenomenologically distinct subtypes. Polyvagal theorists (Dana, Porges) integrate awe into autonomic regulation, reading it as a state requiring the ventral and dorsal vagal circuits in concert. Across these traditions, the central tension concerns whether awe is best treated as a unitary emotion, a family of distinct experiential modes, or a clinical resource for therapeutic transformation.
In the library
23 substantive passages
Awe brings a sense of wonder. It lies 'In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundaries of fear'... We feel small and at the same time connected to something much larger than ourselves, and this sense of connection leads us into a willingness to share and care.
This passage situates awe as the polyvagal state in which ventral and dorsal vagal systems cooperate, producing self-diminishment paradoxically joined with prosocial expansion.
Dana, Deb, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018thesis
Awe brings a sense of wonder. It lies 'In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundaries of fear'... Awe graces us not through material things or social interactions but rather through information-rich experiences like those found in nature, art, and music.
Porges grounds awe in the neurophysiology of immobilization-without-fear, linking its characteristic wonder to information-rich environmental encounters rather than material or social reward.
Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011thesis
I feel like I am a part of a greater whole... I feel the existence of things more powerful than myself... I feel small or insignificant... In the grand scheme of things, my own issues and concerns do not matter as much.
Piff operationalizes the 'small self' construct as the mechanism by which awe translates self-diminishment into prosocial orientation, demonstrating its measurable behavioral consequences.
Piff, Paul K., Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior, 2015thesis
People who have less wealth report feeling more frequent awe during the day, and more wonder about their everyday surroundings... wealth undermines everyday awe and our capacity to see the moral beauty in others, the wonders of nature, or the sublime in music or art.
Keltner argues that awe is a universal, democratically distributed emotion inversely related to material wealth, challenging the assumption that it is an elite aesthetic privilege.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023thesis
Aesthetic chill (i.e., in the context of aesthetic stimuli and accompanied by the hypothesized concomitant emotional state of awe) appears to be unique in demonstrating reliable associations with individual differences in openness to experience.
Williams establishes aesthetic chill as the somatic signature of awe and anchors both constructs to the personality dimension of openness to experience as their most robust individual-difference correlate.
Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022thesis
The phenomenon of aesthetic chills — shivers and goosebumps associated with either rewarding or threatening stimuli — offers a unique window into the brain basis of conscious reward because of their universal nature and simultaneous subjective and physical counterparts.
Schoeller positions aesthetic chills as a privileged empirical window into the neurobiology of awe, offering simultaneous access to both subjective experience and measurable physiological response.
Schoeller, Felix, The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences, 2024thesis
Collective effervescence... we feel like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic 'we.'
Keltner extends the domain of awe beyond nature and art to collective ritual, arguing via Durkheim that social merging is itself a primary awe elicitor across cultures.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023thesis
Experience of aesthetic chills was reliably associated with patterns of ego dissolution, connectedness, and moral elevation... AC was associated with a significant change in reward bias pre- and post-exposure to stimuli.
Schoeller demonstrates that aesthetic chills — the somatic marker of awe — reliably produce ego dissolution, connectedness, and shifts in reward processing, bridging subjective awe phenomenology with measurable neural change.
Schoeller, Felix, The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences, 2024supporting
Three distinct chills categories could be identified... chills can be general markers of intense pleasure and emotion, or instead a collection of distinct phenomenological experiences.
Bannister challenges the unitariness of aesthetic chills as an index of awe, demonstrating that warm, cold, and moving chills represent phenomenologically distinct experiential modes with differing emotional profiles.
Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting
Awe has been described as a 'knowledge' or 'epistemic' emotion... involving evaluation of environmental stimuli in relation to mental models and deriving from attempts to understand the world.
Williams situates awe within the family of epistemic emotions, linking its characteristic cognitive challenge to the broader intellectual motivation underlying openness to experience.
Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting
Warm chills were experiences accompanied by positively valenced feelings such as joy, stimulation and relaxation... Cold chills were experiences accompanied by negatively valenced feelings such as sadness and anger.
Bannister's three-category taxonomy — warm, cold, and moving chills — provides the most detailed phenomenological differentiation of the somatic forms through which awe and related self-transcendent emotions are somatically expressed.
Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting
We shall see how often the sensations that arise during mystical awe, and all encounters with the wonders of life, involve touch, feeling embraced, a warm presence, and an awareness of being seen — clues, perhaps, to the deep origins of the emotion.
Keltner identifies the somatic and relational signatures of mystical awe — warmth, touch, the sense of being seen — as evidence that awe's deep origins lie in attachment and social connection.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
Participants who experienced chills during the experiment reported significantly more positive emotional valence and greater arousal for their experience.
Jain provides large-sample empirical evidence that the onset of aesthetic chills — awe's somatic marker — produces a reliable and directional shift in both valence and arousal, termed an 'emotional drift.'
Jain, Abhinandan, Aesthetic chills cause an emotional drift in valence and arousal, 2023supporting
Openness is the most consistent and specific correlate of awe. Importantly, however, current findings highlight the key role of individual differences in aesthetic engagement and proneness to aesthetic chill.
Williams refines the personality architecture of awe-proneness, establishing that aesthetic engagement and chill-proneness mediate the association between openness and dispositional awe more precisely than broad trait measures alone.
Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting
I felt a rush of goose bumps at being part of something much bigger than any study I would ever do or talk I might give.
Keltner uses autobiographical testimony to illustrate the phenomenology of awe as a felt sense of participation in a scale of moral significance that dwarfs the individual.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
Dispositional awe (chills: r =.19, p =.002; goosebumps: r =.26, p <.001)... the Aesthetics facet, along with proneness to aesthetic chill, demonstrating the strongest associations.
Williams quantifies the convergent validity of dispositional awe and aesthetic chill-proneness, showing them to be empirically overlapping but distinguishable constructs both anchored to the Aesthetics facet of openness.
Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting
Musical or narrative tension builds uncertain predictions, engaging a cascade of stimulus-driven expectations until resolution ultimately satisfies the predictions, eliciting pleasure.
Schoeller grounds awe's somatic correlate in predictive-processing theory, identifying the resolution of uncertainty under dopaminergic precision-signaling as the computational substrate of aesthetic chills.
Schoeller, Felix, The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences, 2024supporting
Panksepp suggested that chills could be elicited by certain acoustic qualities in a piece that resemble mammalian distress vocalizations, indicating social separation and encouraging reunion by inducing feelings of coldness.
Bannister traces an evolutionary substrate for the social-separation account of aesthetic chills, linking their thermoregulatory origins to the neuroanatomical overlap of social warmth and physical warmth.
Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting
Being joyfully moved may be in response to positive events within negative contexts (reunion after a long separation), whereas being sadly moved may be elicited by negative events within positive contexts (self-sacrifice to save one's family).
Bannister articulates the mixed-valence narrative structures most potent in eliciting aesthetic chills, connecting the phenomenology of being moved to the juxtaposition of opposing emotional registers.
Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting
The chatter in my mind, clasping words about the stages of colon cancer, new treatments, lymph nodes, and survival rates, faded. I could sense a force around his body pulling him away.
Keltner's narrative of his brother's death exemplifies awe as a dissolution of discursive cognition in the face of vast, unassimilable experience — a phenomenological prototype for the emotion.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
Aesthetic chills are a universal marker of human peak... we devised a bottom-up, ecologically-valid method consisting in searching for mentions of the emotion's somatic markers in user comments throughout social media platforms.
Schoeller develops an empirically validated stimulus database for aesthetic chills, treating their somatic markers as a universal index of peak awe-related experience accessible through naturalistic digital traces.
Schoeller, Felix, ChillsDB: A Gold Standard for Aesthetic Chills Stimuli, 2023supporting
Some items might be considered outside the typical boundaries of 'aesthetic' stimuli, such as contemplating a grand theory or realizing the solution to a problem; however, these 'cognitive elicitors' are considered to evoke awe.
Williams notes that awe's elicitor domain extends beyond canonical aesthetic stimuli to include cognitive-epistemic events, broadening the construct's scope while complicating instrument design.
Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022aside
A pertinent finding is the proposed link between empathic concern, a culturally appropriate, incongruent response (i.e. not mirroring the observed emotion), and chills, tears and feeling warmth in one's own body.
Bannister highlights empathic concern — distinct from emotional contagion — as a specific trigger for the 'moving chills' subtype, pointing toward the social-relational dimension of awe-adjacent experience.
Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019aside