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Being moved: linguistic representation and conceptual structure.

Milena Kuehnast¹, Valentin Wagner², Eugen Wassiliwizky²

¹Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) Berlin, Germany ; Cluster of Excellence 'Languages of Emotion', Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Frontiers in Psychology

|November 19, 2014

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

This study reveals that being moved involves core emotions of joy and sadness, often triggered by significant life events or art. The conceptual structure of this emotional state is characterized by low arousal and a balanced mix of positive and negative elements.

Keywords:

being moved emotion concepts free word association linguistic representation prosocial feelings

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Psychology
Semantics

Background:

Understanding the semantic field of emotional experiences is crucial for cognitive psychology.
The German language offers rich expressions for nuanced emotional states like 'being moved'.

Purpose of the Study:

To explore the semantic organization and conceptual structure of 'being moved' experiences.
To identify key emotional components and eliciting situations associated with being moved.

Main Methods:

Utilized German-language expressions, specifically present and past participles of psychological verbs, as primes.
Employed a free word-association task to gather data on semantic relatedness.
Applied a taxonomy of basic knowledge types and calculated the Cognitive Salience Index.
Conducted metric multidimensional scaling analyses to map the semantic field.

Main Results:

Identified joy and sadness as central emotional constituents of being moved.
Significant life events and art experiences emerged as primary elicitors.
Semantic field analysis indicated a core cluster of low-arousal, slightly positive valence emotional states.
The conceptual structure reflects a balance of positive and negative elements.

Conclusions:

The experience of being moved is conceptually structured around a blend of positive and negative emotions with low arousal.
Linguistic analysis provides insights into the cognitive architecture of complex emotional states.