Dacher Keltner

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology

The current investigation documented a novel mechanism which underlies and reinforces economic inequality—namely, the inequality bias. Across designs, methods, measures, samples, and societies, we found robust empirical evidence that individuals of higher socioeconomic backgrounds—i.e., higher subjective SES and higher objective annual household in...

The imagination is central to human social life but undervalued worldwide and underexplored in psychology. Here, we offer Possible Worlds Theory as a synthetic theory of the imagination. We first define the imagination, mapping the mental states it touches, from dreams and hallucinations to satire and fiction. The conditions that prompt people to i...

Despite the evolutionary history and cultural significance of visual art, the structure of aesthetic experiences it evokes has only attracted recent scientific attention. What kinds of experience does visual art evoke? Guided by Semantic Space Theory, we identify the concepts that most precisely describe people’s aesthetic experiences using new com...

Have you ever exclaimed “Wow!” when looking at the stars, fireworks, or rainbows? This is the magical feeling of awe. Awe makes us feel small in a big world full of mysteries. Awe makes us focus on things other than just ourselves. Could awe make children more caring and helpful to other people? We tested this idea in two experiments. We showed chi...

Recent work is establishing awe as an important positive emotion that offers physical and psychological benefits. However, early theorizing suggests that awe’s experience is often tinged with fear. How then, do we reconcile emergent positive conceptualizations of awe with its more fearful elements? We suggest that positive conceptualizations of awe...

Core to understanding emotion are subjective experiences and their expression in facial behavior. Past studies have largely focused on six emotions and prototypical facial poses, reflecting limitations in scale and narrow assumptions about the variety of emotions and their patterns of expression. We examine 45,231 facial reactions to 2,185 evocativ...

Cross-cultural studies of the meaning of facial expressions have largely focused on judgments of small sets of stereotypical images by small numbers of people. Here, we used large-scale data collection and machine learning to map what facial expressions convey in six countries. Using a mimicry paradigm, 5,833 participants formed facial expressions...

Editorial on the Science of Compassion Series

Introduction: How people attach value to the outcomes of self and other-social preferences-is central to social behavior. Recently, how dispositional and state emotion shape such social preferences has received researchers' attention. Method: The present investigation asked whether and to what extent dispositional and state compassion predict sh...

In this article, we consider prosociality through the lens of an Indigenous “ethics of belonging” and its two constitutive concepts: kin relationality and ecological belonging. Kin relationality predicates that all living beings and phenomena share a familial identity of interdependence, mutuality, and organization. Within the value system of ecolo...

Individuals with high emotional granularity make fine-grained distinctions between their emotional experiences. To have greater emotional granularity, one must acquire rich conceptual knowledge of emotions and use this knowledge in a controlled and nuanced way. In the brain, the neural correlates of emotional granularity are not well understood. Wh...

In the present work, we used daily diary methodology to investigate the influence of awe on stress, somatic health (e.g., pain symptoms), and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. We recruited a sample of community adults (N = 269) and a sample of healthcare professionals (N = 145) in the United States. Across both samples, we found that...

Fear and anxiety play a central role in mammalian life, and there is considerable interest in clarifying their nature, identifying their biological underpinnings, and determining their consequences for health and disease. Here we provide a roundtable discussion on the nature and biological bases of fear- and anxiety-related states, traits, and diso...

In this investigation, we tested the hypothesis that increased income inequality between individuals will reduce social affiliation within dyadic interactions. In three experiments, we examined the effects of income inequality on key indices of affiliation using semi-structured interactions. In the first two experiments, a participant and confedera...

Here we present semantic space theory and the data-driven methods it entails. Across the largest studies to date of emotion-related experience, expression, and physiology, we find that emotion is high dimensional, defined by blends of upward of 20 distinct kinds of emotions, and not reducible to low-dimensional structures and conceptual processes a...

Fear and anxiety play a central role in the lives of humans and other animals, and there is considerable interest in clarifying their nature, identifying their biological underpinnings, and determining their consequences for health and disease. Although important strides have been made over the past half-century, it has become clear that our unders...

Rooted in the novel and the mysterious, awe is a common experience in childhood, but research is almost silent with respect to the import of this emotion for children. Awe makes individuals feel small, thereby shifting their attention to the social world. Here, we studied the effects of art-elicited awe on children's prosocial behavior toward an ou...

BACKGROUND Background: A downward spike in mental health often marks periods of widespread trauma. With the extreme demand on the healthcare system caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, professionals and community members felt the psychological toll, with depression and anxiety in U.S. adults rising steadily nationwide [1]. Fostering awe, a social emoti...

Human social life is rich with sighs, chuckles, shrieks and other emotional vocalizations, called ‘vocal bursts’. Nevertheless, the meaning of vocal bursts across cultures is only beginning to be understood. Here, we combined large-scale experimental data collection with deep learning to reveal the shared and culture-specific meanings of vocal burs...

Our target article (Park et al., this issue) described the process of developing a provisional conceptualization of emotional well-being (EWB). In that article, we considered strengths and gaps in current perspectives on a variety of related concepts and ways that the proposed conceptualization of EWB informs our evaluation of measures and methods...

Unlabelled: Psychological aspects of well-being are increasingly recognized and studied as fundamental components of healthy human functioning. However, this body of work is fragmented, with many different conceptualizations and terms being used (e.g., subjective well-being, psychological well-being). We describe the development of a provisional c...

Objective: Individual differences in attachment insecurity can have important implications for experiences of positive emotions. However, existing research on the link between attachment insecurity and positive emotional experiences has typically used a composite measure of positive emotions, overlooking the potential importance of differentiating...

This is the Proceedings of the ACII Affective Vocal Bursts Workshop and Competition (A-VB). A-VB was a workshop-based challenge that introduces the problem of understanding emotional expression in vocal bursts -- a wide range of non-verbal vocalizations that includes laughs, grunts, gasps, and much more. With affective states informing both mental...

How do experiences in nature or in spiritual contemplation or in being moved by music or with psychedelics promote mental and physical health? Our proposal in this article is awe. To make this argument, we first review recent advances in the scientific study of awe, an emotion often considered ineffable and beyond measurement. Awe engages five proc...

This is the Proceedings of the ICML Expressive Vocalization (ExVo) Competition. The ExVo competition focuses on understanding and generating vocal bursts: laughs, gasps, cries, and other non-verbal vocalizations that are central to emotional expression and communication. ExVo 2022, included three competition tracks using a large-scale dataset of 59...

The ACII Affective Vocal Bursts Workshop & Competition is focused on understanding multiple affective dimensions of vocal bursts: laughs, gasps, cries, screams, and many other non-linguistic vocalizations central to the expression of emotion and to human communication more generally. This year's competition comprises four tracks using a large-scale...

Little is known about implicit evaluations of complex, multiply categorizable social targets. Across five studies (N = 5,204), we investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias, followed by smaller but nonetheless consi...

The ICML Expressive Vocalization (ExVo) Competition is focused on understanding and generating vocal bursts: laughs, gasps, cries, and other non-verbal vocalizations that are central to emotional expression and communication. ExVo 2022, includes three competition tracks using a large-scale dataset of 59,201 vocalizations from 1,702 speakers. The fi...

Emotions result from evaluations of events, referred to as appraisals. Specific configurations of appraisals have been shown to characterize different emotions, with some variation occurring across cultures. However, appraisal research to date has focused primarily on negative emotions, though recent efforts have started to also examine the apprais...

Emotional expressions are a language of social interaction. Guided by recent advances in the study of expression and intersectionality, the present investigation examined how gender, ethnicity, and social class influence the signaling and recognition of 34 states in dynamic full-body expressive behavior. One hundred fifty-five Asian, Latinx, and Eu...

Social Functionalist Theory (SFT) emerged 20 years ago to orient emotion science to the social nature of emotion. Here we expand upon SFT and make the case for how emotions, relationships, and culture constitute one another. First, we posit that emotions enable the individual to meet six "relational needs" within social interactions: security, comm...

One chapter in the science of emotion has focused, largely through an individualist lens, on just a few emotions: the Ekman Six. Considerable debate has occurred and entrenched positions have ensued. In this essay we offer evidence and argument revealing that there are not only six emotions, nor states measured as valence and arousal, but upwards o...

Little is known about implicit evaluations of complex, multiply categorizable social targets. Across five studies (N = 5,204), we investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias, followed by smaller but nonetheless consi...

Emotions result from evaluations of events, referred to as appraisals. Specific configurations of appraisals have been shown to characterize different emotions, with some variation occurring across cultures. However, appraisal research to date has focused primarily on negative emo-tions, though recent efforts have started to also examine the apprai...

Creativity has many benefits, such as workplace performance and life satisfaction. Three studies extended a small body of work to examine whether awe was associated with creative personality, convergent creativity, and everyday creative behaviors (N = 1,844). Study 1 demonstrated that trait awe was associated with a more creative personality among...

In the present article, we use daily diary methodology to investigate how coping influences well-being via the engagement of positive emotions in immigrant farmworkers and university students from diverse ethnic backgrounds. In Study 1, in a sample of Latinx immigrant farmworkers (N = 76), we found that the daily use of adaptive coping strategies p...

Prosocial behavior, in particular helping others in need, occurs preferentially in response to distress of one’s own group members. In order to explore the neural mechanisms promoting mammalian helping behavior, a discovery-based approach was used here to identify brain-wide activity correlated with helping behavior in rats. Demonstrating social se...

Core to understanding emotion are subjective experiences and their embodiment in facial behavior. Past studies have focused on six emotions and prototypical facial poses, reflecting limitations in scale and narrow assumptions about emotion. We examine 45,231 reactions to 2,185 evocative videos, largely in North America, Europe, and Japan, collectin...

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Central to science and technology are questions about how to measure facial expression. The current gold standard is the facial action coding system (FACS), which is often assumed to account for all facial muscle movements relevant to perceived emotion. However, the mapping from FACS codes to perceived emotion is not well understood. Six prototypic...

Within social functionalist theory (SFT), emotions structure attachment relations, cooperative alliances, hierarchies, and collectives. Within this line of thinking, a rich array of positive emotions enable the formation and negotiation of these relationships. Guided by these arguments, we synthesize how top-down confirmatory studies and data-drive...

It is widely assumed that experiences of awe transform the meaning of daily stresses. Across six studies we tested whether and how the experience of awe is associated with reduced daily stress levels in the moment and, in so doing, leads to elevated life satisfaction. We first documented that individuals who tend to experience greater awe on a dail...

The objective of this study was to investigate (i) whether childhood family SES predicts offspring’s compassion between ages 20–50 years and (ii) whether adulthood SES predicts compassion or vice versa. We used the prospective population-based Young Finns data (N = 637–2300). Childhood family SES was evaluated in 1980; participants’ adulthood SES i...

Understanding the degree to which human facial expressions co-vary with specific social contexts across cultures is central to the theory that emotions enable adaptive responses to important challenges and opportunities1–6. Concrete evidence linking social context to specific facial expressions is sparse and is largely based on survey-based approac...

Affectionate touch is crucial for well-being. However, attachment avoidance is associated with negative attitudes toward touch. We tested two preregistered hypotheses about how attachment avoidance influences the association between touch in romantic couples and psychological well-being. We examined whether greater attachment avoidance is associate...

Within affective science, the central line of inquiry, animated by basic emotion theory and constructivist accounts, has been the search for one-to-one mappings between six emotions and their subjective experiences, prototypical expressions, and underlying brain states. We offer an alternative perspective: semantic space theory. This computational...

Psychological research on awe has largely focused on its positive dimensions, both in terms of the experiential state of awe and individual trait-based predispositions to awe experience. Little is known, however, about awe's negative-valence dimensions, such as individual tendencies to experience awe as threatening. To gain a broader understanding...

Aging into later life is often accompanied by social disconnection, anxiety, and sadness. Negative emotions are self-focused states with detrimental effects on aging and longevity. Awe-a positive emotion elicited when in the presence of vast things not immediately understood-reduces self-focus, promotes social connection, and fosters prosocial acti...

What does it take to gain and maintain power? Aristotle believed that power was afforded to individuals that acted in virtuous ways that promote the greater good. Machiavelli, nearly 2,000 years later, argued to great effect that power could be taken through the use of manipulation, coercion, and strategic violence. With these historical perspectiv...

Given the powerful implications of relationship quality for health and well-being, a central mission of relationship science is explaining why some romantic relationships thrive more than others. This large-scale project used machine learning (i.e., Random Forests) to 1) quantify the extent to which relationship quality is predictable and 2) identi...

Central to the study of emotion is evidence concerning its universality, particularly the degree to which emotional expressions are similar across cultures. Here, we present an approach to studying the universality of emotional expression that rules out cultural contact and circumvents potential biases in survey-based methods: A computational analy...

The approach-inhibition theory of power proposed that elevated power (which relates to increased rewards and freedom) activates approach-related tendencies, whereas reduced power (which relates to increased threat, punishment, and social constraint) activates inhibition-related tendencies (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). In the current artic...

A number of psychological theories suggest that increased economic inequality may lead to greater social class stereotyping. However, all existing evidence for this claim is correlational. Across three experiments (one exploratory and two confirmatory, N = 2,286), we observed that exposure to socially signaled inequality—operationalized in terms of...

Central to our subjective lives is the experience of different emotions. Recent behavioral work mapping emotional responses to 2185 videos found that people experience upwards of 27 distinct emotions occupying a high-dimensional space, and that emotion categories, more so than affective dimensions (e.g., valence), organize self-reports of subjectiv...

Research on adult attachment in romantic relationships has focused on the negative outcomes that avoidantly attached individuals face. The present research uses observational research methods to determine if there are specific ways of communicating affection that might help avoidantly attached people reap similar levels of rewards from affectionate...

Central to our subjective lives is the experience of different emotions. Recent behavioral work mapping emotional responses to 2185 videos found that people experience upwards of 27 distinct emotions occupying a high-dimensional space, and that emotion categories, more so than affective dimensions (e.g., valence), organize self-reports of subjectiv...

The present research tests how socioeconomic inequality (within romantic relationships) predicts relationship quality and observable expressions of emotion—examining longitudinal self-report and behavioral data from both partners of romantic couples. In Part 1 we examined the romantic partners' self-reports of relationship quality at baseline and a...

(presented by SC)

Significance Do our subjective experiences when listening to music show evidence of universality? And if so, what is the nature of these experiences? With data-driven methodological and statistical approaches, we examined the feelings evoked by 2,168 music excerpts in the United States and China. We uncovered 13 distinct types of experiences that p...

Objective: Guided by a functional account of awe, we aimed to test the hypothesis that people who often feel awe are also more curious (Studies 1 and 2), and that this relationship in turn related to academic outcomes (Study 3). Method: In Study 1 (n = 1,005), we used a self-report approach to test the relationship between dispositional awe and...

Awe is an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend current frames of reference. Guided by prior work documenting that awe promotes humility, increases perceptions of uncertainty, and diminishes personal concerns, across 3 studies (N = 776) we tested the hypothesis that awe results in reduced conviction about one's ideological...

What would a comprehensive atlas of human emotions include? For 50 years, scientists have sought to map emotion-related experience, expression, physiology, and recognition in terms of the “basic six”—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Claims about the relationships between these six emotions and prototypical facial configuratio...

What emotions do the face and body express? Guided by new conceptual and quantitative approaches (Cowen, Elfenbein, Laukka, & Keltner, 2018; Cowen & Keltner, 2017, 2018), we explore the taxonomy of emotion recognized in facial-bodily expression. Participants (N = 1,794; 940 female, ages 18-76 years) judged the emotions captured in 1,500 photographs...

An enduring focus in the science of emotion is the question of which psychological states are signaled in expressive behavior. Based on empirical findings from previous studies, we created photographs of facial-bodily expressions of 18 states and presented these to participants in nine cultures. In a well-validated recognition paradigm, participant...

In this article, we review recent developments in the study of emotional expression within a basic emotion framework. Dozens of new studies find that upwards of 20 emotions are signaled in multimodal and dynamic patterns of expressive behavior. Moving beyond word to stimulus matching paradigms, new studies are detailing the more nuanced and complex...

Basic emotion theory (BET) has been, perhaps, the central narrative in the science of emotion. As Crivelli and Fridlund (J Nonverbal Behav 125:1-34, 2019, this issue) would have it, however, BET is ready to be put to rest, facing "last stands" and "fatal" empirical failures. Nothing could be further from the truth. Crivelli and Fridlund's outdated...

The present exploratory research examined the possibility that commitment in close relationships among lower class individuals, despite greater strains on those relationships, buffers them from poorer subjective well-being (SWB). In two samples of close relationship dyads, we found that when partners reported high commitment to the relationship, th...

Central to emotion science is the degree to which categories, such as Awe, or broader affective features, such as Valence, underlie the recognition of emotional expression. To explore the processes by which people recognize emotion from prosody, US and Indian participants were asked to judge the emotion categories or affective features communicated...

In this article, I chart certain origins of the science of emotion back to the cognitive revolution. I then highlight new developments in the field – the influences of emotion upon cognition, the focus on over 20 emotions, the expanding emphasis on positive emotion, and an abiding interest in the functions emotions serve. I close by arguing for the...

published: Cho, M., Impett, E. A., Campos, B., Chen, S., & Keltner, D. (2020). Socioeconomic inequality undermines relationship quality in romantic relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Several theories predict that income inequality may produce increased racial bias, but robust tests of this hypothesis are lacking. We examined this relationship at the U.S. state level from 2004 to 2015 using Internal Revenue Service–based income-inequality statistics and two large-scale racial-bias data sources: Project Implicit (N = 1,554,109) a...

Several theories predict that income inequality may produce increased racial bias, but robust tests of this hypothesis are lacking. We examined this relationship at the U.S. state level from 2004 to 2015 using Internal Revenue Service–based income-inequality statistics and two large-scale racial-bias data sources: Project Implicit (N = 1,554,109) a...

Emotional vocalizations are central to human social life. Recent studies have documented that people recognize at least 13 emotions in brief vocalizations. This capacity emerges early in development, is preserved in some form across cultures, and informs how people respond emotionally to music. What is poorly understood is how emotion recognition f...

The Dispositional Positive Emotions Scales (DPES) are seven separate research scales that measure joy, awe, amusement, pride, contentment, compassion, and love. Despite widespread use of these scales, no comprehensive examination of the psychometric properties of DPES scores has been conducted. In this paper, we examined the internal consistency an...

In this paper we examined the content, structure, and dynamics of reputation, a person’s agreed-upon character that is constructed within social groups. In Study 1, we examined longitudinally the content and structure of an individual’s reputation as distributed across a newly forming group. In Study 2, we examined how the dynamics of reputation sh...

Compassion is known to predict prosocial behavior and moral judgments related to harm. Despite the centrality of compassion to social life, factors predicting adulthood compassion are largely unknown. We examined whether qualities of parent–child-relationship, namely, emotional warmth and acceptance, predict offspring compassion decades later in ad...

Awe is a complex emotion composed of an appraisal of vastness and a need for accommodation. The purpose of this study was to develop a robust state measure of awe, the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S), based on the extant experimental literature. In study 1, participants (N = 501) wrote about an intense moment of awe that they had experienced and then...