Awe is a self-expansive emotion, where the boundaries of a separate self are transcended to process a larger, complex reality. The current review integrates the existing scholarship on awe including the benefits, individual differences, and neuroanatomical correlates of the emotion. We also identify the attentional antecedents to awe experiences, the states and traits that may support or create barriers to experiences of the emotion, and theoretically guided methods to allow the emotion to be accessible in day-today life. We argue that awe may promote prosocial instincts through the recognition of one's place in a vast interconnected world and be particularly beneficial in this age of rapid technological progress and social unrest.

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People view addiction as a source of diminished free will and free will as a requisite to moral responsibility. Accordingly, people should judge addicts as less blameworthy when they act immorally. Yet, people are also sensitive to the personal histories of moral actors, such that the way by which people became addicted may influence these judgments. That is, people’s intuitions may track two types of choices: directly free acts are volitionally unconstrained during the moment of action, whereas indirectly free acts result from temporally prior directly free acts. Across two studies (N=806), we compare people’s moral intuitions about cases in which the actor becomes addicted by force or by choice. We find that perceptions of reduced free will partially mediate an association between choice (vs. no choice) in addiction and moral blame for a bad act (Study 1). We replicate this pattern with another case, and show that blame judgments are stronger when the bad act is related (vs. unrelated) to obtaining the addictive substance (Study 2). Our work highlights that lay people evince relatively nuanced intuitions about the role of free will in addiction and morality, tracking direct and indirect freedom when doling out moral blame.

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