The Science of Awe: What Researchers Are Learning About Self-Transcendence
For most of its history, scientific psychology kept a careful distance from wonder. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness all got decades of attention, partly because they are easy to trigger in a lab. Awe had to wait until 2003, when Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published the paper that finally gave it a working definition. Two decades later, awe has become one of the busiest corners of emotion science. The findings would not startle anyone who has spent time with the mystics. What might startle you is how literal the confirmation has become, right down to measuring the size of the self in the pixels of a selfie. ...