Kids help others more after experiencing awe

Listening to a majestic symphony, standing beneath a towering cathedral, or viewing a beautiful painting — these are all experiences that can lead to feelings of awe. When we experience awe, we feel small and our attention shifts to the wider world rather than ourselves — and past work on adults has suggested that this fosters prosocial behaviour that benefits others.

Now a new study has found that feelings of awe also make children more prosocial too. This is perhaps unsurprising: as the authors of the new paper in Psychological Science write, "Intrinsically curious and hungry for the mysterious, children are built for awe".

Eftychia Stamkou at the University of Amsterdam and colleagues ran two studies on groups of children aged eight to 13. In the first, 159 children watched one of three video clips. One clip was designed to evoke awe, and was taken from an animated film called Song of the Sea, in which the main character turns into a seal and transforms the city while flying above it. Another, a clip from Fantasia, had previously been found to elicit joy (like awe, joy is a positive emotion, but relates more directly to feelings of pleasure or entertainment). The third clip was an instructional video, which wasn't intended to evoke any emotion in particular. Afterwards, the children used emoji-based scales to report their experience of various emotions, including awe and joy.

In the next stage of the study, the team asked the children to engage in an easy but time-consuming task: they had to sort through lists of foods that had supposedly been donated to refugees at a food drive and count the total number of donations for each item. The children were informed that this task was voluntary, and that they could stop when they wanted. When they did stop, an experimenter gave them a ticket to a local museum as a reward — but also asked if they wanted to donate this ticket to a refugee family.

The emoji results showed that the children did indeed experience the emotions that the researchers had intended the clips to elicit. And the team found that, compared with children who'd watched the joy-inspiring clip, those in the awe condition counted 1.5 times more food items and were 2.9 times more likely donate their ticket. Compared with children who'd watched the instructional video, they counted 2.1 times more food items and were 3.77 times more likely to donate their ticket. This study "showed that awe promotes children's prosociality," the team concludes.

In a second study, the researchers found that children who'd watched the awe-inducing clip were also more likely to donate a more tangible item — a chocolate snack given as a reward for participating — than those who'd watched the joy-eliciting or neutral clips.

In this study, the team also used electrodes to gather data on the children's levels of parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system activity. The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for 'fight or flight'; it's more active when we perceive a threat or are physically active or excited. The parasympathetic nervous system does the opposite: it calms the body.

The team found that children in the awe condition experienced an increase in parasympathetic nervous system activity, while this was reduced in children in the other two conditions. Earlier work on adults has associated feelings of awe with increased parasympathetic nervous system activity, which, the team notes, has been linked to calm social engagement in both adults and children. The new results fit with this. In fact: "Our work is the first to demonstrate that awe-eliciting art can spark prosociality in children, even encouraging them to donate tangible resources, and this effect concurs with physiological processes associated with social engagement," the team writes.

There are a few limitations to the study. The team did not explore how long the awe-induced boost to prosocial behaviour might last, for instance, and it's also worth noting that there are other ways to increase parasympathetic nervous system activity without experiencing awe (for example, slowing your breathing, and making your out-breaths longer than your in-breaths is a reliable and straightforward method).

But the team thinks that if awe-inspiring events can be integrated more into children's environments, this should encourage greater prosociality from a young age.

They also argue that their work has important implications for philosophical theories of art. Countless studies have found that art brings benefits to the individual who engages with it. "Our work provides concrete evidence for art's behavioural consequences on outcomes that promote other people's wellbeing," they conclude.