What Does Awe Mean? How It Affects the Mind and Body

Awe is a complex emotion triggered by encountering something vast that challenges your existing understanding of the world. Psychologists define it through two core features: a sense of immensity, whether physical, conceptual, or social, and a feeling that your usual mental frameworks aren’t quite big enough to make sense of what you’re experiencing. That combination separates awe from simpler reactions like surprise or admiration, and it helps explain why the emotion can feel so disorienting and profound at the same time.

The Two Ingredients That Make Awe Different

The most influential psychological framework for awe identifies two elements that show up in every clear instance of the emotion: perceived vastness and what researchers call a “need for accommodation.” Vastness doesn’t have to be literal size. It can be the scale of a mountain range, but it can also be the scope of an idea, the depth of a musical performance, or the moral stature of someone’s actions. The key is that whatever you’re encountering feels bigger than your ordinary frame of reference.

1PubMed. Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion

The second ingredient is what makes awe feel so different from simply being impressed. “Need for accommodation” means your brain’s existing categories don’t neatly file away what you’re seeing, hearing, or thinking about. You have to stretch or revise your mental model to absorb it. That’s why awe often comes with a slight sense of confusion or overwhelm alongside the wonder. You’re not just registering something large; you’re registering something that doesn’t fit into the boxes you already have.

2PubMed. Awe as a Scientific Emotion

This framework helps explain why people can feel awe in wildly different situations. Standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, watching a time-lapse of cell division, hearing a piece of music that builds to a shattering climax, or witnessing an extraordinary act of courage can all produce the same basic emotional signature if both elements are present. The vastness is different in each case, but the need to mentally stretch is the same.

Why Awe Makes You Feel Small (and Why That’s Usually Good)

One of the most consistent findings in awe research is that the emotion shrinks your sense of self. Researchers call this the “small self” effect. When you’re standing under a canopy of ancient redwoods or watching footage of Earth from space, your personal concerns, ambitions, and worries temporarily feel less significant. Your attention shifts outward.

Across five studies involving over 2,000 participants, researchers found that this small-self feeling wasn’t just an internal shift but changed how people behaved. People experiencing awe acted more generously and cooperatively. The mediating pathway ran through that sense of personal smallness: awe shrank the self, and the shrunken self made room for concern about others.

3PubMed. Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior

The prevailing explanation for why this happens is straightforward. Awe pulls your attention away from self-focused thoughts. With less mental bandwidth devoted to “me and my problems,” more bandwidth opens up for “us and our problems.”

4PubMed. Why Does Awe Have Prosocial Effects? New Perspectives on Awe and the Small Self

This is where awe starts looking like more than a pleasant feeling. If an emotion reliably makes people more generous and more oriented toward collective well-being, it takes on a social dimension. Some researchers view awe as a fundamentally collective emotion, one that evolved in part because it helped early humans bond, cooperate, and orient themselves within groups. That reading is speculative, but the behavioral data backing the prosocial effect is solid.

What Triggers Awe

Nature is the single most commonly reported source of awe. When researchers compare exposure to extraordinary natural scenes against everyday nature and neutral conditions, the extraordinary scenes reliably produce stronger feelings of smallness, humility, and mood improvement. They also shift people toward more prosocial attitudes.

5PubMed Central. An exploratory study into the effects of extraordinary nature on emotions, mood, and prosociality

Not all natural settings are equally awe-inducing. A quiet suburban park and the Northern Lights are both “nature,” but they operate on entirely different emotional registers. Research on what makes certain landscapes extraordinary has identified five dimensions that matter: the sense of awe itself, remoteness, mystery, complexity, and uniqueness. Of those, uniqueness turned out to be the strongest driver. The more singular and irreplaceable a landscape feels, the more powerfully it prompts emotional recovery and well-being.

6Journal of Environmental Psychology. Research on the physiological and psychological impacts of extraordinary nature on emotions and restorative effects for young adults

But nature is far from the only trigger. Architecture reliably produces awe, particularly monumental structures like cathedrals, mosques, and grand public buildings. Studies find that immensity and ornamentation both predict awe responses to built spaces, and that religious architecture in particular fosters feelings of openness.

7Frontiers. Exploring the Emotional Impact of Awe-Inducing Architecture

Other triggers include music that builds to extraordinary peaks, witnessing feats of extreme skill or courage, encounters with powerful ideas in science or philosophy, and certain social experiences like large-scale rituals or collective ceremonies. What unites them is the same two-ingredient formula: something feels vast, and your existing mental framework doesn’t entirely absorb it.

What Awe Does to Your Sense of Time

One of the more surprising effects of awe is that it warps time perception. Across multiple experiments, people who had just experienced awe reported feeling like they had more time available. They were less impatient and more willing to volunteer their time for others. These weren’t just mood effects; the mechanism traced specifically to awe’s ability to pull people into the present moment. When you’re fully absorbed in something vast and unfamiliar, the usual mental chatter about past regrets and future deadlines quiets down, and the present moment expands.

8PubMed. Awe expands people’s perception of time, alters decision making, and enhances well-being

The practical upshot is interesting. People who felt awe-related time abundance also reported higher life satisfaction. When you feel like time is plentiful rather than scarce, decisions shift. You’re more patient, more deliberate, and less likely to trade quality of experience for speed. It’s a striking example of how a single emotional shift can ripple into everyday decision-making.

What Happens in the Brain During Awe

Neuroscience research on awe is still relatively young, but one finding stands out. When people watch awe-inducing videos in a brain scanner, activity in the default mode network drops. The default mode network is a set of brain regions that’s most active when you’re thinking about yourself: daydreaming, ruminating, planning, reflecting on your identity. Key areas within this network, including the frontal pole, angular gyrus, and posterior cingulate cortex, showed reduced activation during awe compared to a baseline absorption condition.

9PubMed Central. The neural correlates of the awe experience: Reduced default mode network activity during feelings of awe

This lines up neatly with the small-self finding from behavioral research. If awe makes the self feel smaller, you’d expect the brain regions most associated with self-referential thinking to quiet down, which is exactly what happens. The brain isn’t just registering “big thing” and moving on. It’s actively reorganizing where it directs attention, pulling resources away from the internal monologue and pointing them outward.

Awe and Physical Health

The connection between awe and physical health is one of the more intriguing threads in this research. A study examining the relationship between positive emotions and inflammation found that awe was the strongest predictor of lower levels of interleukin-6, a proinflammatory cytokine linked to chronic disease. This held true even after accounting for other positive emotions like joy, amusement, and contentment. Something about awe specifically, rather than just “feeling good,” tracked with reduced inflammation.

10PubMed. Positive affect and markers of inflammation: discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines

One hypothesis for why this happens ties back to the stress reduction pathway. Chronic stress drives inflammation, and the small-self effect of awe may interrupt the kind of self-focused rumination that fuels stress responses. That’s plausible but unproven as a causal chain. What’s clear is that the association between awe and lower inflammatory markers is unusually strong compared to other positive emotions.

Can Awe Be Used Therapeutically?

Researchers have started testing whether deliberately inducing awe can improve mental health outcomes. In a randomized controlled trial with people suffering from long COVID, an awe-based intervention delivered virtually led to a roughly 17 percent decrease in depression symptoms, a 12 percent drop in stress, and a 16 percent increase in well-being. These were medium-to-large effect sizes, suggesting the intervention wasn’t just producing marginal improvements.

11Scientific Reports. Awe reduces depressive symptoms and improves well-being in a randomized-controlled clinical trial

Other work has focused on older adults. An eight-week “awe walk” intervention, where participants were instructed to seek out awe during weekly outdoor walks, boosted prosocial positive emotions during the walks themselves. However, it did not produce changes in baseline anxiety, depression, or life satisfaction measured at the end of the study.

12PubMed Central. Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults

The difference between those two findings matters. The long COVID trial used a structured virtual intervention and measured people with active symptoms. The awe-walk study measured generally healthy older adults. Awe interventions may be more effective when there’s a baseline problem to improve, which would align with how many psychological interventions work: they help most when something is off, and produce subtler effects in people who are already doing well.

A separate line of research has noticed that the mystical experiences reported during psychedelic-assisted therapy share deep structural features with awe: vastness, a dissolving sense of self, and the need to accommodate something far outside ordinary experience. Some researchers have proposed that awe itself may be a key mechanism underlying why psychedelic therapy produces lasting improvements in depression and anxiety.

13PubMed. Awe: a putative mechanism underlying the effects of classic psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy

Cultural Differences in How People Experience Awe

Awe appears to be a universal human emotion, but the way people experience it varies across cultures. A validation study of a dispositional awe scale across the United States, Iran, Malaysia, and Poland found significant country-level differences. The largest gap was between the U.S. and Iran, where American participants scored substantially higher in self-reported awe proneness.

14PubMed. Cross-cultural similarities and differences in the experience of awe

The picture gets more nuanced when you look at the emotional valence of awe. In Western contexts, awe is overwhelmingly framed as positive: beautiful, uplifting, inspiring. But research comparing Japanese and American samples found that the positive and negative aspects of awe were separable. North Americans were more predisposed to feel the positive dimensions, while for Japanese participants, the predispositions to feel positive and negative aspects of awe were positively correlated. In other words, Japanese participants who were more prone to the wonder of awe were also more prone to its unsettling, overwhelming side.

15Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Individual and Cultural Differences in Predispositions to Feel Positive and Negative Aspects of Awe

This is worth sitting with because Western psychology’s emphasis on awe as a feel-good emotion may be culturally specific. The original English word “awe” carries a thread of fear and reverence: you can be “awesome” but also “awful.” Many other languages encode that ambivalence more explicitly. The therapeutic applications of awe may need to account for the fact that, for some people and in some cultural contexts, awe is not cleanly positive. It can be mixed with dread, disorientation, or a destabilizing sense of insignificance.

Awe in Children

Awe isn’t just an adult emotion. Children as young as four show recognizable responses to awe-inducing stimuli. In a series of preregistered studies with American children ages four through nine, awe-inspiring scenes of expansive nature and natural disasters evoked perceived vastness, motivation to explore, and awareness of the unknown more strongly than everyday scenes. The effect sizes ranged considerably but some were large. Expansive nature scenes also positively affected children’s sense of self more than expansive social stimuli did.

16PubMed. Seeing awe: How children perceive awe-inspiring visual experiences

Perhaps most interesting, diverse awe-inspiring scenes, including vast nature, natural disasters, and even slow-motion footage of everyday objects, all boosted children’s learning motivation compared to ordinary scenes. That finding suggests awe may be wired into how children explore and make sense of the world. The emotion doesn’t just feel good; it drives the curiosity needed to revise and expand mental models, which is essentially what learning is.

Who Is More Prone to Awe?

People differ substantially in how easily and frequently they experience awe. Personality research consistently finds that openness to experience is the strongest predictor of awe-proneness. The aesthetic sensitivity component of openness seems especially important: people who are moved by art, beauty, and novel experiences tend to experience awe more readily and more intensely.

17PubMed Central. Openness to experience and awe: examination of dispositional tendencies, laboratory induction, and daily life experiences

Extraversion also plays a role. Research with Chinese college students found that both openness and extraversion predicted higher dispositional awe, which in turn predicted greater subjective well-being.

18PubMed. Openness to Experience, Extraversion, and Subjective Well-Being Among Chinese College Students: The Mediating Role of Dispositional Awe

This doesn’t mean introverts or people low in openness can’t experience awe. It means they may need stronger stimuli to get there. A person high in openness might feel awe watching a sunset; a person lower in that trait might need the full Grand Canyon. The threshold differs, but the capacity appears to be broadly human.

Awe Through Spirituality and Religion

Religious and spiritual traditions have been engineering awe experiences for millennia: soaring cathedral ceilings, choral music, vast mythological narratives, meditation practices aimed at ego dissolution. Research confirms that this isn’t just cultural window dressing. Across five studies with over a thousand participants, recalling spiritual experiences increased feelings of awe and the small self in both religious and non-religious people. Spiritual experiences also boosted spiritual humility but didn’t affect intellectual humility, suggesting the pathway runs through a sense of personal smallness rather than through a general tendency to defer to others.

19Elsevier / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Spiritual experiences evoke awe through the small self in both religious and non-religious individuals

The fact that non-religious people showed the same awe response to spiritual experiences is telling. It suggests awe is the deeper phenomenon, and religion is one powerful delivery system for it among several. The architecture, the music, the ritual all serve as technology for producing vastness and cognitive accommodation. You don’t need to believe any specific theological claim to have the emotion triggered by the stimuli those traditions have refined.

Virtual Reality and the Overview Effect

If awe requires vastness, and vastness often requires physical presence at extraordinary places, technology offers an interesting workaround. Astronauts have long described the “overview effect,” a profound shift in perspective and global identity triggered by seeing Earth from space. Researchers have now tested whether a virtual reality simulation of that experience can produce something similar.

A VR space tour successfully elicited awe, increased global identity, and motivated pro-environmental behavior. The VR condition produced stronger awe than music alone, suggesting immersive visual simulation adds something that audio can’t replicate on its own.

20Journal of Environmental Psychology. A virtually-induced overview effect? How seeing the world from above through a simulated space tour is related to awe, global identity and pro-environmental behaviour

Neurophysiological monitoring of participants in a similar VR space journey confirmed that self-reported awe matched measurable changes in brain and body responses.

21Virtual Reality. Neurophysiological evidence for the overview effect: a virtual reality journey into space

This opens up practical possibilities. Not everyone can visit the Grand Canyon or the Arctic, but a VR headset can simulate the visual vastness that triggers awe. The therapeutic applications are already being explored: the long COVID trial mentioned earlier delivered its awe intervention virtually. As the technology improves, access to reliable awe experiences may become dramatically easier, which raises its own questions about whether convenient, repeatable awe has the same psychological punch as the rare, hard-won kind.

Everyday Practices for Seeking Awe

You don’t need a VR headset or a trip to Patagonia. One of the more accessible findings from awe research is that deliberate attention is often the missing ingredient, not dramatic stimuli. A study exploring daily mindful photography as a tool for accessing awe found that the practice increased mindfulness and curiosity over six weeks. The researcher didn’t travel to extraordinary places. Instead, the practice of pausing to really observe and photograph ordinary surroundings opened up moments of beauty and wonder that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

22PubMed Central. The Extended-Now: A Heuristic Inquiry Into Accessing Awe and Beauty Through Daily Mindful Photography

The lesson maps onto the broader research: awe doesn’t require extreme stimuli so much as a particular kind of attention. Slowing down enough to notice the complexity of tree bark, the choreography of a murmuration of starlings, or the sheer improbability of being alive at all can produce the same two-ingredient recipe of vastness and mental recalibration. The triggers are everywhere. The bottleneck is usually attention, not access.