Do positive and threatening awe broaden or narrow our attention? Evidence from three experiments using reaction times and eye-tracking

Awe is an emotion characterised by perceived vastness and a need for accommodation, and it can be experienced as either positive or threatening. These features make awe an informative case for assessing how emotion shapes attentional scope. Although awe has been proposed to broaden attention, empirical evidence is limited and mixed. Across three experiments, we differentiated between positive and threatening awe and examined how they influence attentional scope relative to a neutral condition. Participants viewed positive awe, threatening awe, or neutral stimuli before completing a Navon task requiring global vs. local shape judgments. Experiments 1 and 2 used short videos and reaction time measures; Experiment 3 additionally displayed background images during task performance and recorded eye movements to assess continuous gaze allocation. Reaction time analyses revealed robust effects of task and congruency but no reliable interaction between emotion and task. Eye-tracking data showed reduced gaze eccentricity in both awe conditions compared with the neutral condition, but this likely reflects differences in salient visual features. To increase statistical power and assess robustness across analytic decisions, we conducted a mega-multiverse analysis combining all datasets and varying pre-processing pipelines. Across several pipelines, awe, especially positive awe, showed a trend towards larger global-local differences than neutral, indicating modest attentional broadening. These findings suggest that awe exerts potential small effects on attentional scope and highlight the value of multiverse approaches and multimodal data when investigating cognition–emotion interactions.