Awe is characterized as an ambivalent affect in the human behavior and cortex

Abstract

Awe is a complex emotion that encompasses conflicting affective feelings inherent to its key appraisals, but it has been studied as either a positive or a negative emotion, which has made its ambivalent nature underexplored. To address whether and how awe’s ambivalent affect is represented both behaviorally and neurologically, we conducted a study using virtual reality (VR) and electroencephalography (N = 43). Behaviorally, the subjective ratings of awe intensity for VR clips were accurately predicted by the duration and intensity of ambivalent feelings. In the electrophysiological analysis, we identified a latent neural-feeling space for each participant that shared valence representations across individuals and stimuli, using deep representational learning and decoding analyses. Within these spaces, ambivalent feelings were represented as spatially distinct from positive and negative ones, with large individual differences in their separation. Notably, this variability significantly predicted subjective awe ratings. Lastly, hidden Markov modeling revealed that the multiple band powers, particularly in the frontoparietal channels, were significantly associated with differentiation of valent states during awe-inducing VR watching. Our findings consistently highlight the salience of ambivalent affect in the subjective experience of awe at both behavioral and neural levels. This work provides a nuanced framework for understanding the complexity of human emotions with implications for affective neuroscience. Using VR, EEG, and contrastive learning, this study found that subjective awe is better predicted by behavioral and neural representations of mixed feelings than by those of purely positive or negative ones, challenging a univalent viewpoint of awe.