Abstract
This study explored the organization of the semantic field and the conceptual structure of moving experiences by investigating German-language expressions referring to the emotional state of being moved. We used present and past participles of eight psychological verbs as primes in a free word-association task, as these grammatical forms place their conceptual focus on the eliciting situation and on the felt emotional state, respectively. By applying a taxonomy of basic knowledge types and computing the Cognitive Salience Index, we identified joy and sadness as key emotional ingredients of being moved, and significant life events and art experiences as main elicitors of this emotional state. Metric multidimensional scaling analyses of the semantic field revealed that the core terms designate a cluster of emotional states characterized by low degrees of arousal and slightly positive valence, the latter due to a nearly balanced representation of positive and negative elements in the conceptual structure of being moved.
Highlights
Feelings of “being moved” are emotional states experienced in situations as different as watching one’s own child winning a prize at a school competition, listening to a favorite love song, or witnessing human misery after natural disasters
We investigated German-language expressions which refer to states of being moved in order to elucidate the conceptual structure of this class of emotional states
Our exploratory study of the emotion terms designating moving experiences utilized the linguistic properties of eight psychological change-of-state verbs and the grammatical properties of their present and past participles as point-of-view markers: present participles focus on the change-eliciting stimuli, whereas past participles focus on the experiencer
Summary
Feelings of “being moved” are emotional states experienced in situations as different as watching one’s own child winning a prize at a school competition, listening to a favorite love song, or witnessing human misery after natural disasters. Researchers in the field of psychology have only recently turned their attention to the feeling of being moved (Tokaji, 2003; Konecni, 2005; Tan, 2008). Most of the interest in this topic is found among researchers studying emotional responses to artworks (see Tan and Frijda, 1999; Konecni et al, 2007; Oliver and Bartsch, 2010). Its goal is to map the more general meaning of being moved. This includes references to experiences of artreception, but does not cover the more specific discussions about being moved in rhetoric and aesthetics (cf Konecni, 2005, 2011)
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