This essay was co-authored by Artemisia O'bi and Fan Yang
As we travel along life, we encounter lots of ups and downs, and at different points along the way, we also find ourselves in moments that profoundly move us. Some of these are awe experiences: times when we perceive things so vast that they transcend our existing understanding of the world, they make us forget about our usual concerns, take us beyond the boundary of ourselves, and feel astonished by and connected to the world.
But what do these moments feel like when they happen in childhood? From what point in life are we able to appreciate awe?
We started to think about children’s perceptions of awe in the early months of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was coming into view. At the time, our external world was becoming increasingly constrained, with widespread school closures and lockdowns, yet the 4-to-9-year-old kids we worked with in the Human Nature and Potentials Lab — a developmental psychology research center at the University of Chicago — remained just as open and full of wonder as ever. The contrast was palpable.
Our conversations began to swirl around the imaginative and resilient nature of kids. We thought about the potential for early awe experiences to influence children’s worldview and maybe even their sense of self. We wondered whether or not children noticed the difference between moments of awe and other kinds of everyday moments in life and how these perceptions might affect them. These questions led us to design new studies to better understand the emergence of awe in childhood.
Research on adults has shown that awe experiences induce the feeling of perceiving something vast that transcends one’s current understanding, and many historical and spiritual texts note the centrality of awe in peak experiences. There is even research that theorizes how awe may have helped our ancestors survive throughout history.
Despite lots of different studies showing that adults react positively to awe, little research has looked at awe-inspiring experiences early in life.
Some people may doubt kids’ capacity to perceive awe. Since awe is usually talked about in the context of a profound experience, it could be the case that awe is a complex subjective state that only emerges with substantial life experience and wisdom. We acknowledged this possibility, but people who spend ample time with children can tell you that they look out at the world with keen eyes and big curiosity. They notice and delight in what may seem mundane to us as adults.
Therefore, we tinkered with the idea that awe may also be a deeply rooted human experience — one that could be appreciated even in childhood.
We started by looking at children’s responses to different forms of awe to see if they would differentiate between awe-inspiring and everyday experiences.
In our first study, we showed children a video of positive, beautiful nature scenes excerpted from the BBC’s "Planet Earth" and asked them to compare it to a video showing everyday scenes of small plants growing in an ordinary backyard garden. After watching each video, children reported that they viewed themselves as smaller after watching the awe-inspiring video than after the everyday video. They shared that they would love to watch the awe video again. They also felt more motivated to explore and understand unknown things.
In our next study, children even reported similar feelings in response to a video of natural disaster imagery compared to ordinary backyard garden imagery. This supports the view that a sense of awe can be elicited not only by positive experiences but also by negative or threatening vast experiences, such as those involving perceptually vast natural disasters.
These findings suggested that children perceived a difference between awe-inspiring imagery and everyday imagery, and we found ourselves asking: If children could perceive awe, what kind of influence might awe-inspiring moments have on their sense of self?
We turned our attention to the effects awe may have on children’s sense of self — their understanding and feeling of who they uniquely are.
We designed a study to see if children might respond differently to awe-inspiring nature imagery versus awe-inspiring social imagery, such as scenes of large groups of people. Based on research showing how large crowds can make people feel trivialized and de-individualized, we thought that big crowds might evoke awe, but might not bring about a positive sense of self.
We showed children the same beautiful nature videos from the first study, along with videos of big crowds moving through city streets. We asked them similar reflection questions from our first studies and included additional questions to explore the effect of the imagery on their sense of self.
We found multiple positive effects of the vast nature video on children’s sense of self. The nature scenes were more likely than the crowd scenes to lead children to think beyond their usual needs and desires. They also made children feel more capable of improving their own lives and more unique.
At least three types of awe-inspiring imagery have gotten a lot of attention in science and have been researched in adult studies: vast nature, threatening natural disasters, and depictions of objects at an unusual scale, such as microscopic images or objects moving in slow motion.
We compared children's responses to imagery of each of these three categories of awe to those of everyday scenes. We asked new questions about the children's feelings of awe, fear, and joy, as well as their familiarity with the images.
All three types of imagery led to a greater sense of awe than the everyday imagery and increased children’s motivation to learn new things. These findings showed that it is not just one category of awe that has these kinds of effects. In fact, there are lots of different kinds of awe — many more than we could test — that may have the potential to inspire and motivate children to think and act differently.
Our studies shed light on children’s perceptions of the difference between awe experiences and other kinds of everyday moments. And this difference influences their sense of awe, joy, and fear, along with their motivation to explore, awareness of things to understand, and aspects of their sense of self.
Even though awe experiences are complex and profound, it seems we do not have to wait until we are grown-ups to appreciate them. Instead, we are given the gift of sensitivity to awe even in our childhood, which we carry onward into life as we are continually inspired.
These findings underscore the value of nurturing awe in childhood. Simultaneously, they prompt reflection for every adult: Are we losing our deeply rooted ability to find and appreciate awe? Amidst our busy lives, perhaps we should remember that we were all once children ourselves, and we all have the potential to experience the world's awe-inspiring beauty in appreciative ways.
References
Gottlieb, S., Keltner, D., & Lombrozo, T. (2018). Awe as a scientific emotion. Cognitive Science, 42(6), 2081–2094. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12648
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
O'bi, A., & Yang, F. (2024). Seeing awe: How children perceive awe‐inspiring visual experiences. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14069
Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A., Anderson, C. L., Piff, P. K., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2018). Awe and humility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(2), 258–269. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000109
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