Measuring awe using online user comments
(A2022-107619)

AUTHORS

Felicitas Morhart, HEC Lausanne; Zitian Qiu, HEC Lausanne; Francine Espinoza Petersen, HEC Lausanne

ABSTRACT

Awe, an emotion arising from the perception of vast stimuli overwhelming current mental structures, can usually be felt during experiences with nature, art, and spirituality. This emotion also closely pertains to luxury brands that use awe-eliciting marketing stimuli. One of the most salient issues for contemporary research on the topic of awe is how to measure it efficiently and accurately. Thanks to the wealth of textual data on the Internet, researchers can use a dictionary-based text analysis approach to detect users’ emotions (e.g., fear). Against this background, we adopted a theory-based Bag-of-Words process to develop the first awe-measurement dictionary, which allows us to measure the extent to which people experienced awe through their comments to a stimulus (e.g., YouTube video). Our dictionary has been validated to effectively capture and distinguish awe from the six basic human emotions.