How is State Awe Different from Interest and Curiosity?

According to Izard (1977) awe might be an intense variant of interest that motivates curiosity and exploration. However, recent work shows that state awe (vs. interest) is linked to a greater appreciation of present circumstances, a greater sense of smallness, and a lesser sense of exploration (Campos et al., 2013), and that it broadens attentional scope on a global-local attention processing task (Sung & Yih, 2015). To directly compare how awe (NS1 = 56, NS2 = 67) differs from interest (NS1 = 68, NS2 = 66) and curiosity (NS1 = 68, NS2 = 61), we reanalysed data from our recent paper (in press) in which 6 emotions were manipulated through retrospective recall. While the original paper compared awe to the mean of 5 other epistemic emotions, here, using simple contrasts, we compared awe directly to interest and to curiosity. Across both studies we found that awe (vs. interest and curiosity) was less likely to arise when the situation contained insufficient information, and was more likely to arise when the situation exceeded one’s expectancies. Awe (vs. interest and curiosity) was also linked to a greater sense of smallness, and awe was higher in positive valence when compared to curiosity, but not when compared to interest. Finally, we uncovered no significant differences for action tendencies (exploration and avoidance).