Awe

Awe brings a sense of wonder. It lies ‘In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundaries of fear’ (Keltner & Haidt, 2003, p. 297). We feel small and at the same time connected to something much larger than ourselves

This passage establishes the polyvagal framing of awe as a neurophysiologically grounded state of wonder that couples self-diminishment with felt connection, situated at the threshold between pleasure and fear.

Dana, Deb, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018thesis

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Awe brings a sense of wonder. It lies ‘In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundaries of fear’ (Keltner & Haidt, 2003, p. 297). We feel small and at the same time connected to something much larger than ourselves

Porges grounds awe within the polyvagal framework, identifying it as an autonomic state that requires the joining of dorsal vagal stillness with ventral vagal safety to occur without fear activation.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011thesis

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It is a myth that awe is rarefied, reserved for when we have enough wealth to enjoy lives of taste and ‘culture.’ … 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 and democratically distributed emotion, more abundant among those with less material wealth, and constitutes a basic human need rather than a luxury of cultivated sensibility.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023thesis

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‘I feel like I am a part of a greater whole’ and ‘I feel the existence of things more powerful than myself.’ To assess self-diminishment, participants rated their agreement with the item ‘I feel small or insignificant’

Piff operationalizes the ‘small self’ as awe’s defining phenomenological signature, linking felt insignificance and felt connection to a greater whole as the twin axes of awe’s prosocial effects.

Piff, Paul K., Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior, 2015thesis

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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 correlate specifically associated with awe, and identifies openness to experience as the stable personality trait most reliably predicting both chill proneness and awe responsiveness.

Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022thesis

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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 frames aesthetic chills as the privileged empirical window onto awe’s neural substrate, linking the phenomenon to conscious reward, interoceptive prediction, and the embodied generation of emotion.

Schoeller, Felix, The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences, 2024thesis

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art, we shall see, so often provides a space in our imagination for contemplating human horrors, giving rise to aesthetic experiences of awe… collective effervescence… we feel like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self

Keltner identifies collective effervescence as a primary wondrous elicitor of awe, arguing that the emotion is constitutively linked to the dissolution of individual self-boundaries into communal belonging.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023thesis

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current findings highlight the key role of individual differences in aesthetic engagement and proneness to aesthetic chill… openness is the most consistent and specific correlate of awe

Williams confirms and refines the personality substrate of awe, demonstrating that aesthetic engagement and chill proneness are more discriminating predictors than broad openness scores alone.

Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting

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awe has been described as a ‘knowledge’ or ‘epistemic’ emotion, along with ‘interest’ and ‘surprise,’ 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, characterizing it as arising from the encounter between incoming vastness and the inadequacy of existing mental schemas.

Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting

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Experience of aesthetic chills was reliably associated with patterns of ego dissolution, connectedness, and moral elevation (Christov-Moore et al., 2023)

Schoeller reports that aesthetic chills — awe’s somatic marker — co-occur reliably with ego dissolution and moral elevation, suggesting a shared neurobiological pathway linking aesthetic peak experience to self-transcendence.

Schoeller, Felix, The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences, 2024supporting

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The experience of aesthetic chills, often defined as a subjective response accompanied by goosebumps, shivers and tingling sensations, is a phenomenon often utilized to indicate moments of peak pleasure and emotional arousal

Bannister introduces the key empirical question of whether aesthetic chills are a unitary marker of peak awe or a family of phenomenologically distinct responses differentiated by valence and social function.

Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting

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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 tripartite taxonomy of chills — warm, cold, and moving — challenges the assumption that aesthetic chills uniformly index awe, revealing that phenomenologically distinct states share the same somatic surface.

Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting

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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 traces the somatic phenomenology of mystical awe — warmth, touch, and felt recognition — to deep evolutionary and attachment origins, linking the religious and the embodied dimensions of the experience.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting

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participants who experienced chills during the experiment reported significantly more positive emotional valence and greater arousal for their experience

Jain demonstrates that aesthetic chills produce a reliable ‘emotional drift’ toward positive valence and heightened arousal, providing empirical evidence for the mood-transformative function of awe’s somatic correlate.

Jain, Abhinandan, Aesthetic chills cause an emotional drift in valence and arousal, 2023supporting

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Dopamine signals violations of expectations, or prediction errors, driving learning to update expectations… Musical or narrative tension builds uncertain predictions, engaging a cascade of stimulus-driven expectations until resolution ultimately satisfies the predictions, eliciting pleasure

Schoeller situates aesthetic chills — and by extension awe — within a predictive-coding and dopaminergic reward framework, in which the pleasurable shock of awe arises from the brain’s encounter with expectation-violating vastness.

Schoeller, Felix, The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences, 2024supporting

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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 offers a first-person account of awe triggered by moral beauty and collective action, illustrating how the small-self effect and somatic chills co-arise in encounters with human solidarity.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting

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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 rehearses Panksepp’s evolutionary account of aesthetic chills as phylogenetically rooted in separation-distress vocalization circuitry, linking awe’s somatic dimension to ancient social-bonding neurobiology.

Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting

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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 identifies empathic concern as a distinct pathway to aesthetic chills, suggesting that prosocial emotions — closely related to awe’s moral beauty dimension — can independently trigger the chills response.

Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting

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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 provides convergent validity data showing that dispositional awe proneness and aesthetic chill proneness are significantly correlated, with the aesthetics facet of openness as their shared personality substrate.

Williams, Paula G., Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting

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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 distinguishes the phenomenological varieties of being moved, foregrounding the role of valence-incongruent narrative contexts in generating the mixed emotional blends characteristic of awe-adjacent aesthetic responses.

Bannister, Scott, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting

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Listening to Rolf’s breath, I sensed the vast expanse of fifty-five years of our brotherhood… I could sense a force around his body pulling him away. And questions in my mind.

Keltner’s autobiographical narrative of his brother’s death provides a phenomenological illustration of awe arising at the threshold of mortality, evoking vastness through temporal depth and relational loss.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023aside

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Aesthetic chills are a universal marker of human peak

Schoeller introduces ChillsDB as an empirical resource that operationalizes aesthetic chills — awe’s somatic index — as a cross-culturally universal phenomenon suitable for standardized research.

Schoeller, Felix, ChillsDB: A Gold Standard for Aesthetic Chills Stimuli, 2023aside

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