Awe

For Charles Darwin, Vasquez’s whoa illustrates how we alert others to the wonders of life and align ourselves in understanding and action. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals from 1872, Darwin detailed the evolution of our emotional expressions, like the chimpanzee waterfall dance or social mammals huddling when feeling perilous cold. Three of the emotional expressions he described are relatives of awe: admiration, astonishment, and devotion. Admiration involves a smile. Astonishment— when we are stunned by a vast, unexpected event—lacks the smile, but involves the hand placed over the mouth. And devotion involves behaviors that signal a recognition of the sacred. The face points upward. The body kneels humbly. The eyes close, as in Bernini’s well-known sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Hands might be open and turned up, as in Giotto’s painting of Saint Francis preaching to an audience of birds as he wondered “much at such a multitude of birds and at their beauty.”

Is there a universal expression of awe, one that has united us throughout our evolution to recognize together the wonders of life? To answer this question, my Yale collaborator Daniel Cordaro gathered data in China, Japan, South Korea, India, and the United States in search of the body of awe. In a lab in each country, most often just an empty classroom, participants first heard short stories about emotional situations from a speaker of their native language, and then they expressed the emotion portrayed in the story with their bodies in whatever fashion they liked. It was an experiment in emotional charades. Eight months of coding the millisecond-by-millisecond unfolding of bodily movements revealed the following.

People from the five countries screamed with fear, snarled in anger, licked their lips and puckered during desire, and sometimes literally danced with joy. What about awe? Across the five cultures, people expressed awe with eyebrows and upper eyelids raised, a smile, jaw drop, and head tilting up. About half of the bodily movements of awe were universal or shared across cultures. A quarter of each expression was unique to the individual, shaped by that person’s life story and genetics. And about 25 percent of the movements were specific to each culture, in the form of culturally specific “accents.” In India, for example, the expression of awe included a seductive lip pucker; perhaps it’s all those erotic sculptures and treatises on tantric sex that are embodied in the Indian expression of awe.

Vasquez’s whoa is what is known as a vocal burst, a pattern of sound that lasts a quarter of a second or so, doesn’t involve words, and is intended to convey emotion. Other examples of vocal bursts include sighs, laughs, shrieks, growls, blechs, oohs, aahs, and mmms. Vocal bursts are millions of years old and were a primary language of Homo sapiens prior to the emergence of words some 100,000 years ago. Many social mammals, including great apes, horses, goats, dogs, elephants, and bats, have repertoires of vocal bursts by which they communicate about threat, food, sex, affiliation, comfort, pain, and play.

To understand whether awe’s whoas are universal, we had people vocalize their feelings associated with different situations, such as: “You’ve stubbed your toe on a large rock and feel pain.” Ouch! Or “You see someone who is physically attractive and want to have sex.” Mmm (very similar to the sound we make when tasting delicious food). Or “You have just seen the largest waterfall in the world.” The vocal bursts of awe sounded like whoa or aaaah or wow. When we played these sounds to people from ten countries, they correctly identified vocal bursts of awe nearly 90 percent of the time. This finding struck us: the vocal burst of awe is the most universal sound of emotion, and readily recognized by people in a remote village in the Himalayas of eastern Bhutan, whose residents had minimal contact with Western missionaries or expressive media from the West and from India. Before the emergence of language some 100,000 years ago, we were saying whoa to our kith and kin to join together in facing the vast mysteries of life.

Awe and Culture Evolving