Children’s Perceptions Of Awe: Investigating profound emotional experience early in life

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Awe is a profound emotion that has been closely linked to wonder and the sublime and is thought to be an integral component of many spiritual, religious, and peak experiences (Burke, 1975; James, 1902; Maslow, 1964). However, the perception of awe experiences during development remains largely underexplored. Existing research on emotion development has only focused on children's understanding and experiences about emotions that center around the self (e.g., happiness, sadness, pride, shame, guilt) or center on another individual (e.g., empathy and sympathy). But awe by its very nature is a "self-transcendent emotion", which binds us and helps us transcend to groups and entities larger than the self (Keltner & Haidt, 1999, 2003). We know very little about the emergence and development of self-transcendent emotions like awe in childhood. We begin to address this void in the field by asking: How do children perceive awe experiences?
In two preregistered studies we investigate children’s perceptions of and emotional responses to awe experiences. The first study focuses on positive experiences of awe, whereas the second study focuses on negative, threat-based awe. In Study 1, 4-9-year-old children (N = 61) watched two videos: an awe-inspiring video of the BBC’s Planet Earth consisting of a montage of sweeping panoramic footage of natural landscapes (Rivera et al., 2020) and a neutral video of plants in a small garden. Children answered questions about how the video made them feel. We found that awe experiences, in comparison to neutral experiences, lead children to perceive a smaller self relative to the rest of the world (M = 0.90 , p < 0.001), an overall increased motivation to explore unknown things (M = 0.75 , p < 0.001 ), more perceived mysteries in the world to understand (M = 0.93 , p < 0.001), but do not lead children to feel more connected to everything in the world ((M = 0.44 , p = 0.44 ), Figure 1. To explore whether children’s perceptions of awe are unique to positive experiences, in Study 2, 4-9-year-old children (N = 54, target N = 60) watched an awe-inspiring video of destructive, threatening natural disasters, and the same neutral video of garden scenery, and then answered the same questions as in Study 1. Consistent with results from Study 1, preliminary results revealed that after negative awe experiences, compared to neutral experiences, children also perceived a smaller self (M = 0.72, p = 0.001), felt motivated to explore more unknown things in the world (M = 0.65 , p = 0.02), and perceived more mysteries in the world (M = 0.74 , p < 0.001), but did not feel more connected to everything in the world (M = 0.43, p = 0.50) Figure 2.
In conclusion, these findings show novel evidence that children perceive awe experiences and discern them from neutral experiences. These results suggest that children may have profound, potentially self-transcendent, emotional experiences, inspiring questions about the evolutionary and adaptive functions of awe experiences in emotional and cognitive development.

Authors

• Artemisia Deluna O'bi, None
  Presenting Author

• Fan Yang, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author