Admiration

Admiration is a social emotion felt by observing people of competence, talent, or skill exceeding standards.

[3] Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt[1] include admiration in the category of other-praising emotions, alongside awe, elevation, and gratitude.

[6] Witnessing admirable acts has been shown to increase motivation for self-improvement in the domain of witnessed excellence (e.g., sporting performance), but also a more general motivation to work towards achieving one's own life goals.

[1] Using fMRI, admiration has been shown to be related with higher-level cognitive processes involved in motivation (e.g., planning, pursuit of goals), but also relates to lower-level activating mechanisms, demonstrating that admiration is a physically energising emotion.

They propose that admiration is the emotion we feel towards those social groups we perceive as competent (or high-status) and warm (friendly and cooperative) (e.g., in studies involving students in the US, an example of a group perceived as competent and warm is the British).