Reinterpreting ‘awe’: why cross‑cultural emotional intelligence needs to be handled with care

Awe has emerged as an emotional currency in Western wellness, linked to health and social benefits. However, cross-cultural research shows it can evoke both positive and negative feelings, challenging its universal appeal.

Awe has become a kind of emotional currency in Western wellness circles – revered for its ability to boost mental and physical health and even social interactions. There are findings linking awe to increased prosocial behaviour, curiosity, humility, wellbeing, lower post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more adaptive physiological profiles. And yet across cultures, awe can provoke veneration and wonder or it can stimulate feelings of dread. What if awe does not travel?

That’s the question posed by a new set of cross-cultural studies that I co-authored with researchers from a wide range of academic institutions. The research offers direct evidence of how awe may not be a universal feel-good emotion.

Using daily emotion diaries and physiological data, we found evidence that while awe may be typically experienced as a positive emotion by people in the US in western contexts, in China, it can be experienced with some fear and tension by people in China.

Our findings challenge the assumption that awe always leads to connection or improved wellbeing – and raises big questions about how awe is used in mental health programmes, leadership training, and marketing around the world.

Psychologists and pioneers in the study of awe, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt define awe as:

Awe is an emotion we experience when we’re faced with something vast and mind-stretching. But this research shows that while the spark may be the same, how we actually feel can be very different depending on culture.

The first study was based on more than 2,500 diary entries recording moments of awe or joy among 166 university students in China and the US over a two-week period.

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