# Prof. Jonathan Haidt's research on awe is cited

1 Faculty News September 8, 2014 ![NPR logo](/sites/default/files/styles/246w/public/assets/images/con_030855.jpg?itok=Ti1_93MD)>

Excerpt from [NPR](http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/09/08/346746891/awe-with-and-without-the-gods) -- "To be sure, awe is a multi-faceted emotion, and one that's only recently become the target of systematic psychological research. In an influential 2003 paper, psychologists Dacher Keltner and [Jonathan Haidt](http://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/jonathan-haidt) argued that awe is characterized by two central features: vastness and accommodation. Vastness describes the experience of something larger than the self, whether that vastness is a matter of physical size or of metaphorical size, such as great power. Accommodation refers to the need to modify one's current mental structures to make sense of the experience — whether or not such modification is actually enacted or succeeds."

[Read more](http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/09/08/346746891/awe-with-and-without-the-gods)