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.

This is the first comprehensive theoretical article on aesthetic emotions. Following Kant’s definition, we propose that it is the first and foremost characteristic of aesthetic emotions to make a direct contribution to aesthetic evaluation/appreciation. Each aesthetic emotion is tuned to a special type of perceived aesthetic appeal and is predictive of the subjectively felt pleasure or displeasure and the liking or disliking associated with this type of appeal. Contrary to the negativity bias of classical emotion catalogues, emotion terms used for aesthetic evaluation purposes include far more positive than negative emotions. At the same time, many overall positive aesthetic emotions encompass negative or mixed emotional ingredients. Appraisals of intrinsic pleasantness, familiarity, and novelty are preeminently important for aesthetic emotions. Appraisals of goal relevance/conduciveness and coping potential are largely irrelevant from a pragmatic perspective, but in some cases highly relevant for cognitive and affective coping. Aesthetic emotions are typically sought and savored for their own sake, with subjectively felt intensity and/or emotional arousal being rewards in their own right. The expression component of aesthetic emotions includes laughter, tears, and facial and bodily movements, along with applause or booing and words of praise or blame. Aesthetic emotions entail motivational approach and avoidance tendencies, specifically, tendencies toward prolonged, repeated, or interrupted exposure and wanting to possess aesthetically pleasing objects. They are experienced across a broad range of experiential domains and not coextensive with art-elicited emotions.

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positive and negative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our DistancingEmbracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories.

This article investigates an age-old, puzzling question: how can a negatively valenced emotion such as sadness go together with aesthetic liking and even pleasure? We propose that an answer to this question must take into account the feeling of being moved, a complex emotional state that plays a major role in the history of poetics and aesthetics and has recently begun to attract interest in psychological research. We conducted a study in an actual cinema using film clips as sadness-eliciting stimuli. In total, 76 participants watched 38 clips that presented variations of the same sad scenario: a character or a group of characters learns ahout the death of a close person. The study revealed a highly signiftcant positive correlation between sadness and enjoyment. However, this correlation was almost fully mediated by the feeling of heing moved. Hence sadness primarily functions as a contributor to and intensifier of the emotional state of being moved. Furthermore, the study revealed that being moved is a positive term in two senses. First, it refers to an overall positive feeling. Second, it indicates a positive value judgment regarding the power of a film to elicit such feelings. Therefore, we conclude that it is the overall positive feeling of being moved itself that recipients of sad films and other forms of art enjoy-we simply like to he moved. Taken together, our fmdings are significant for investigations of the so-called 'sad-filtn paradox' and the aesthetic pleasure associated with negative emotions more generally.

Can we experience depictions of repulsive objects more positively when we watch them as part of a work of art? We addressed this question by using a scenario approach in a laboratory setting designed to activate two different cognitive schemata: participants viewed the same pictures framed either as art photographs or as documentary photographs for educational purposes. Self-reports of the positivity, the negativity, and the intensity of the affective responses yielded three results. First, participants experienced the photos more positively in the art-framing condition. Second, the negativity ratings did not differ in both conditions, suggesting that art framing does not erase, diminish, or convert the negative affect vis-à-vis the disgusting stimulus features. Third, there was no difference in terms ofthe intensity of the experience-a result that contradicts the position that aesthetic emotions are less intense than ordinary emotions. The results of our study suggest that cognitive schema activation should be included in a multifactor psychological account of the aesthetic enjoyment of artworks that involve negative emotions. More specifically, results add to the growing insight into what distinguishes aesthetically modified emotions from ordinary emotions.