This essay was co-authored by Artemisia O'bi and Fan Yang

As we travel along life, we encounter lots of ups and downs, and at different points along the way, we also find ourselves in moments that profoundly move us. Some of these are awe experiences: times when we perceive things so vast that they transcend our existing understanding of the world, they make us forget about our usual concerns, take us beyond the boundary of ourselves, and feel astonished by and connected to the world.

But what do these moments feel like when they happen in childhood? From what point in life are we able to appreciate awe?

We started to think about children’s perceptions of awe in the early months of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was coming into view. At the time, our external world was becoming increasingly constrained, with widespread school closures and lockdowns, yet the 4-to-9-year-old kids we worked with in the Human Nature and Potentials Lab — a developmental psychology research center at the University of Chicago — remained just as open and full of wonder as ever. The contrast was palpable.

Our conversations began to swirl around the imaginative and resilient nature of kids. We thought about the potential for early awe experiences to influence children’s worldview and maybe even their sense of self. We wondered whether or not children noticed the difference between moments of awe and other kinds of everyday moments in life and how these perceptions might affect them. These questions led us to design new studies to better understand the emergence of awe in childhood.

Research on adults has shown that awe experiences induce the feeling of perceiving something vast that transcends one’s current understanding, and many historical and spiritual texts note the centrality of awe in peak experiences. There is even research that theorizes how awe may have helped our ancestors survive........

© Psychology Today