What is AWE? Individual Differences in Describing the Emotion and Experience of AWE in Japan

Awe is described as a feeling of great respect mixed with fear or surprise, and is an emotion involving perceived vastness and need for accommodation (Keltner and Haidt, 2003). Research has also shown that awe is related to feelings of small-self, leading to prosociality (Piff et al., 2015) and well-being (Gordon et al., 2015). Past research has used different methods to measure awe. For instance, Shiota et al. (2006) constructed the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES) to measure seven different positive emotions, including awe, using five to six items in each factor. Furthermore, studies have asked participants to describe situations in which they experienced the emotion of awe to better understand its definition (e.g. Piff et al., 2015, Bai et al., 2017). In this study, we aimed to create a Japanese version of the DPES, and in addition asked the participants to define awe in their own words and to describe a situation in which they felt awe to further deepen the understanding of awe in a Japanese context. The findings confirmed the construct validity of the DPES, and implicated the importance of considering the small-self aspect in Japan. In addition, the definition and narratives of awe provided by the participants indicated that participants defined awe in terms of both fear and respect, and interpersonal situations were recalled by participants as awe inducing. Discussion which focused on cross-cultural comparison between the findings in Western context and in Japan indicated the universality of its construct as well as its possible differences such as its cultural specific narratives that induced the emotion of awe. These results suggested further need to differentiate negative and positive valence of the meaning awe in future studies to comprehend the extent to which awe may or may not lead to well-being.