The emotional state of being moved, though frequently referred to in both classical rhetoric and current language use, is far from established as a well-defined psychological construct. In a series ...of three studies, we investigated eliciting scenarios, emotional ingredients, appraisal patterns, feeling qualities, and the affective signature of being moved and related emotional states. The great majority of the eliciting scenarios can be assigned to significant relationship and critical life events (especially death, birth, marriage, separation, and reunion). Sadness and joy turned out to be the two preeminent emotions involved in episodes of being moved. Both the sad and the joyful variants of being moved showed a coactivation of positive and negative affect and can thus be ranked among the mixed emotions. Moreover, being moved, while featuring only low-to-mid arousal levels, was experienced as an emotional state of high intensity; this applied to responses to fictional artworks no less than to own-life and other real, but media-represented, events. The most distinctive findings regarding cognitive appraisal dimensions were very low ratings for causation of the event by oneself and for having the power to change its outcome, along with very high ratings for appraisals of compatibility with social norms and self-ideals. Putting together the characteristics identified and discussed throughout the three studies, the paper ends with a sketch of a psychological construct of being moved.
Aesthetic perception and judgement are not merely cognitive processes, but also involve feelings. Therefore, the empirical study of these experiences requires conceptualization and measurement of ...aesthetic emotions. Despite the long-standing interest in such emotions, we still lack an assessment tool to capture the broad range of emotions that occur in response to the perceived aesthetic appeal of stimuli. Elicitors of aesthetic emotions are not limited to the arts in the strict sense, but extend to design, built environments, and nature. In this article, we describe the development of a questionnaire that is applicable across many of these domains: the Aesthetic Emotions Scale (Aesthemos). Drawing on theoretical accounts of aesthetic emotions and an extensive review of extant measures of aesthetic emotions within specific domains such as music, literature, film, painting, advertisements, design, and architecture, we propose a framework for studying aesthetic emotions. The Aesthemos, which is based on this framework, contains 21 subscales with two items each, that are designed to assess the emotional signature of responses to stimuli's perceived aesthetic appeal in a highly differentiated manner. These scales cover prototypical aesthetic emotions (e.g., the feeling of beauty, being moved, fascination, and awe), epistemic emotions (e.g., interest and insight), and emotions indicative of amusement (humor and joy). In addition, the Aesthemos subscales capture both the activating (energy and vitality) and the calming (relaxation) effects of aesthetic experiences, as well as negative emotions that may contribute to aesthetic displeasure (e.g., the feeling of ugliness, boredom, and confusion).
Being moved has received increased attention in emotion psychology as a social emotion that fosters bonds between individuals and within communities. This increased attention, however, has also ...sparked debates about whether the term “being moved” refers to a single distinct profile of emotion components or rather to a range of different emotion profiles. We addressed this question by investigating lay conceptions of the emotion components (i.e., elicitors, cognitive appraisals, subjective feelings, bodily symptoms, and consequences for thought/action) of “bewegt sein” (the German term for “being moved”). Participants (
N
= 106) provided written descriptions of both a moving personal experience and their conceptual prototype of “being moved,” which were subjected to content analysis to obtain quantitative data for statistical analyses. Based on latent class analyses, we identified two classes for both the personal experiences (joyfully-moved and sadly-moved classes) and the being-moved prototype (basic-description and extended-description classes). Being joyfully moved occurred when social values and positive relationship experiences were salient. Being sadly moved was elicited by predominantly negative relationship experiences and negatively salient social values. For both classes, the most frequently reported consequences for thought/action were continued cognitive engagement, finding meaning, and increased valuation of and striving for connectedness/prosociality. Basic descriptions of the prototype included “being moved” by positive or negative events as instances of the same emotion, with participants in the extended-description class also reporting joy and sadness as associated emotions. Based on our findings and additional theoretical considerations, we propose that the term “being moved” designates an emotion with an overall positive valence that typically includes blends of positively and negatively valenced emotion components, in which especially the weight of the negative components varies. The emotion’s unifying core is that it involves feeling the importance of individuals, social entities, and abstract social values as sources of meaning in one’s life.
The neural processing of speech and music is still a matter of debate. A long tradition that assumes shared processing capacities for the two domains contrasts with views that assume domain-specific ...processing. We here contribute to this topic by investigating, in a functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) study, ecologically valid stimuli that are identical in wording and differ only in that one group is typically spoken (or silently read), whereas the other is sung: poems and their respective musical settings. We focus on the melodic properties of spoken poems and their sung musical counterparts by looking at proportions of significant autocorrelations (PSA) based on pitch values extracted from their recordings. Following earlier studies, we assumed a bias of poem-processing towards the left and a bias for song-processing on the right hemisphere. Furthermore, PSA values of poems and songs were expected to explain variance in left- vs. right-temporal brain areas, while continuous liking ratings obtained in the scanner should modulate activity in the reward network. Overall, poem processing compared to song processing relied on left temporal regions, including the superior temporal gyrus, whereas song processing compared to poem processing recruited more right temporal areas, including Heschl's gyrus and the superior temporal gyrus. PSA values co-varied with activation in bilateral temporal regions for poems, and in right-dominant fronto-temporal regions for songs. Continuous liking ratings were correlated with activity in the default mode network for both poems and songs. The pattern of results suggests that the neural processing of poems and their musical settings is based on their melodic properties, supported by bilateral temporal auditory areas and an additional right fronto-temporal network known to be implicated in the processing of melodies in songs. These findings take a middle ground in providing evidence for specific processing circuits for speech and music in the left and right hemisphere, but simultaneously for shared processing of melodic aspects of both poems and their musical settings in the right temporal cortex. Thus, we demonstrate the neurobiological plausibility of assuming the importance of melodic properties in spoken and sung aesthetic language alike, along with the involvement of the default mode network in the aesthetic appreciation of these properties.
Art-Elicited Chills Indicate States of Being Moved Wassiliwizky, Eugen; Wagner, Valentin; Jacobsen, Thomas ...
Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts,
11/2015, Letnik:
9, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Following suggestions by Benedek and Kaernbach (2011), we investigated the hypothesis that art-elicited chills might indicate emotional states of being moved. We focused on two prototypical variants ...of being moved: one involving sadness as a key component, and the other joy. Thirty participants watched 25 moving film excerpts of either the sadly or the joyfully moving type (e.g., farewell scenarios and reunion scenarios, respectively). They rated how sad, how joyful, and how moved they felt after each film clip, and how much they enjoyed it. They also reported whether or not they experienced chills during the exposure. Multilevel mediation analyses showed that the relation between sadness and enjoyment was almost fully mediated by being moved, whereas no such mediation effect was found for the relation between joy and enjoyment. The results of a logistic regression revealed that the higher the intensity of episodes of being moved, the more likely they were to be accompanied by chills. Moreover, being moved proved to be the best predictor for chills, compared to sadness and joy. Finally, we discuss the importance of distinguishing chills in general from art-elicited chills in particular, as well as the importance of identifying the emotion that underlies art-elicited chills.
This psychophysiological study is the first to examine the relationship between emotional tears and emotional piloerection (i.e., goosebumps). Although both phenomena have been related to peak states ...of being moved, details about their temporal occurrence and the associated levels of physiological arousal have remained unknown. In our study, we used emotionally powerful film scenes that were self-selected by participants. Our findings show that even within peak moments of emotional arousal, a gradation of intensity is possible. The overlap of tears and goosebumps signifies a maximal climax within peak moments. On the side of the stimulus, we found that displays of prosocial behavior play a crucial role in the elicitation of tears and goosebumps. Finally, based on the results of a formal film analysis of the tears-eliciting clips provided by our participants, as compared to randomly extracted, equally long control clips from the same films, we show how the technical and artistic making of the clips was optimized for the display of social interaction and emotional expressions.
We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity--i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning--might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word ...combinations such that the meaning of a target word is iconically expressed, or highlighted, in the phonetic properties of its immediate verbal context. To this end, we extracted single lines from German poems that all include a word designating high or low dominance, such as large or small, strong or weak, etc. Based on insights from previous studies, we expected to find more vowels with a relatively short distance between the first two formants (low formant dispersion) in the immediate context of words expressing high physical or social dominance than in the context of words expressing low dominance. Our findings support this hypothesis, suggesting that neighboring words can form iconic dyads in which the meaning of one word is sound-iconically reflected in the phonetic properties of adjacent words. The construct of a contiguity-based phono-semantic iconicity opens many venues for future research well beyond lines extracted from poems.
The present study retested previously reported empirical evidence suggesting an iconic relation between sound and emotional meaning in poetry. To this end, we analyzed the frequency of certain ...phoneme classes in 48 German poems and correlated them with ratings for emotional classification. Our analyses provide evidence for a link between the emotional classification of poems (joyful vs. sad) and the perception of tonal contrast as reflected in the attribution of phenomenological sound qualia (bright vs. dark). However, we could not confirm any of the previous hypotheses and findings regarding either a connection between the frequencies of occurrence of specific vowel classes and the perception of tonal contrast, or a relation between the frequencies of occurrence of consonant classes and emotional classification.
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