The Experience of Awe and its Relation to the Tendency for Curiosity

Awe is an emotion that increases the individual’s capacity to accommodate new, perplexing information into existing schemas (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). We hypothesized that awe would also be associated with increased curiosity.  Participants completed the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES), which includes a trait measure of proneness to feelings of awe, before viewing an awe-eliciting or happiness-eliciting video.  Participants then completed the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI).  Higher dispositional levels of awe predicted increased curiosity, even after controlling for other positive emotions.  However, participants who viewed the awe-eliciting video did not report higher curiosity than those who watched the happiness-eliciting video.  The awe-eliciting video also moderated the effects of trait awe on curiosity, such that when induced to feel awe, awe-prone individuals became more curious than their less awe-prone counterparts. These findings indicate that there is a dynamic person by situation interplay underlying the relationship between awe and curiosity.