Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner

The conversation opens with awe as both a felt experience and a possible route to better health. Keltner points to findings he says link awe with lower inflammation, higher vagal tone, and reduced long COVID symptoms, including a report that one minute of awe a day was associated with symptom reduction. The excerpt does not give the study design or effect size, so these claims are best read as a research direction rather than a clinical prescription. Huberman’s description of awe as a physical lift gives them a useful starting point: awe feels expansive, but its definition still needs explaining.

Keltner traces his interest in awe to a gap in the emotion science he encountered as a young scholar. The field around Paul Ekman had concentrated on negative states such as anger, fear, and disgust, and on their physiology. Keltner’s own upbringing exposed him to music, protest, visual art, literature, dance, and collective movement—experiences that mattered to him but were not well described by that research focus. He recalls Ekman’s advice to study awe as the moment that set this line of work in motion.

That shift also changes how the interview frames facial expressions. Ekman’s influential New Guinea work used still photographs to test whether people recognized six expressions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile. Keltner notes that the strong universality claim has been challenged by researchers including Jim Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett. Developmental evidence is mixed as well: young children show disgust-like responses to bad smells, while anger is harder to pin down consistently across development. The old six-expression map, in other words, is a starting point in a contested research history, not a complete inventory of emotional life.

Keltner describes a broader taxonomy emerging from work in his lab and elsewhere. He says researchers have identified roughly 20 facial expressions, including laughter, love, compassion, awe, embarrassment, shame, and pain. He also points to computational analysis by Alan Cowen and collaborators: the team analyzed two million videos from 144 cultures and reported 75 percent overlap across cultures in how people displayed 16 expressions in situations such as seeing fireworks, concentrating on a test, or laughing with friends. Keltner characterizes perhaps 50 to 60 percent of expression patterns as hardwired, while stressing that the question is difficult to study and that earlier manual coding was extremely slow. These estimates describe a developing field, not a settled rule that a face alone reveals exactly what someone feels.

Huberman then asks how emotion relates to three connected dimensions: the emotion itself, movement, and language. He contrasts a person who feels anger while keeping still and speaking precisely with someone whose anger is expressed through gesture and less controlled speech. The excerpt ends before Keltner answers, leaving the central methodological question open: how should researchers connect inner experience with bodily action and words without treating any single channel as the whole emotion?

Keltner answers Huberman’s three-part framing by treating emotion as a coordination problem. Bodily movement, language, and felt experience can travel together, but they do not reliably match. He estimates that expressive motor patterns and the language people use correlate only weakly, around 0.2, and notes that culture and individual style can widen the gap. A calm exterior, a forceful gesture, or a person’s own label therefore cannot by itself settle what they feel. Keltner calls the felt quality of emotion one of the field’s least-charted problems: it is not clear how movement, words, images, and memories combine into a conscious feeling.

That uncertainty does not make emotion inaccessible to research. Keltner argues for choosing measures that fit the phenomenon: researchers can study facial movement, gaze, skin coloration, breathing, vagal tone, immune and gut activity, brain responses, and voice. He credits contemplative traditions with drawing attention to breathing; in the example he gives, a deep exhalation can activate the vagus nerve and is associated with calm and warmth in the chest. His broader methodological point is to let human experience suggest what to measure, then use the strongest available measures rather than forcing every question through a single instrument.