Seeing awe: How children perceive awe‐inspiring visual experiences

Abstract

Awe is a profound, self‐transcendent emotion. To illuminate its origin, four preregistered studies examined how U.S. 4‐ to 9‐year‐old children perceive awe‐inspiring stimuli (N = 444, 55% female, 58% White, tested in 2020–2023). Awe‐inspiring expansive nature (Study 1) and natural disaster scenes (Study 2) evoked perceived vastness, motivation to explore, and awareness of the unknown more than everyday scenes did (d ranging 0.32–1.76). Compared to expansive social stimuli, expansive nature stimuli more positively affected children's sense of self (Study 3). Diverse awe‐inspiring scenes (vast nature, natural disasters, and slow‐motion objects) all elicited awe and higher learning motivation than everyday scenes did (Study 4). These findings suggest that children appreciate awe‐inspiring visual experiences, illuminating the origins and nature of awe as a self‐transcendent experience.

Observing prosociality and talent: the emotional characteristics and behavioral outcomes of elevation and admiration in 6.5- to 8.5-year-old children

“…Hence, the current study was conducted with older children (i.e., 6.5-to 8.5-year-olds) so that we could implement a self-report measure of children's emotional experiences and thus, bridge the gap between existing elevation work with preschool aged children (Hepach and Tomasello, 2020) and adults (e.g., Algoe and Haidt, 2009). Furthermore, developmental work around other-praising emotions (e.g., awe, respect) suggests that emotions of such complexity emerge during middle childhood, providing a justification for the middle childhood age range (Malti et al, 2020;Vaish and Savell, 2022;O'bi and Yang, 2024).…”

“…We encourage future research to include a control condition to test whether children's engagement and accuracy scores are due to both conditions eliciting prosociality or whether it is due to children's general enjoyment of the task. Another possible explanation for why admiration and elevation elicit similar prosocial motivations is that admiration is like awe which has been shown to promote prosocial behavior (Stamkou et al, 2023;O'bi and Yang, 2024). Both admiration and awe arise when seeing someone excellent with the difference that admiration likely leads to a desire to also excel at a task whereas a person experiencing awe likely feels that the excellence is beyond themselves (Keltner and Haidt, 2003;Shiota et al, 2014).…”