Dacher Keltner's Awe and the Artistic Interests Facet (O2)

Dacher Keltner has spent his career studying the emotions that pull people together, and Awe is his book about the most overlooked of them. He argues that awe, the feeling of encountering something bigger than yourself, is not a rare mountaintop event but an everyday nutrient we are starved of. His research center puts it simply: as the Greater Good Science Center he directs describes it, "Awe is the feeling we get in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world, like looking up at millions of stars in the night sky or marveling at the birth of a child." How readily you reach for that feeling is, in the Big Five, one facet.

The pull toward wonder is the Artistic Interests facet

That facet is Artistic Interests (O2), under Openness, how drawn you are to beauty, art, music, and the natural world for their own sake. Keltner's sources of awe, a piece of music or a canyon, are the same experiences O2 measures your appetite for. A high scorer stops and is moved; a low scorer registers the view and checks the time. Keltner's argument is that the moving is not a luxury: awe quiets the self-focused chatter, and even small doses seem to make people kinder and calmer. High O2 is a standing openness to being struck by the world.

The hopeful part of Keltner's science is that the benefit does not require a high score to collect. A low-O2 person who deliberately seeks out a night sky or a long piece of music gets the same drop in stress and the same widening of perspective, even if the appetite for it does not come naturally. This runs close to Imagination (O1), the rich inner life that often travels with a taste for beauty, though the two can come apart: some people feel awe most in nature, others most in ideas. Keltner's practical push is simply to build more of these encounters into an ordinary week.

For a reader placing themselves, your O2 is a fair read on how much of this you already reach for and how much you would have to seek on purpose. High on it and Keltner is naming a channel you already run wide open, with the reminder that it is doing real work on your wellbeing, not just your taste. Low on it and the useful news is that the benefit is available anyway, more a matter of showing up to vastness than of already loving it. Where you sit on Artistic Interests tells you how easily the world moves you, and we take the facet apart in Artistic Interests (O2).

Read the book: Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner.

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