Being moved as one of the major aesthetic emotional states: A commentary on “Being moved: linguistic representation and conceptual structure”

Citation: Koně cni VJ (2015) Being moved as one of the major aesthetic emotional states: A commentary on " Being moved: linguistic representation and conceptual structure ". Recently in this journal, Kuehnast et al. (2014) empirically explored the semantic, psychological, and emotional features of being moved. The purpose of this commentary is to relate the results and discussion of Kuehnast et al. to aesthetic concepts and theory. One of the key tasks of both psychological and philosophical aesthetics is the analysis of peak experiences in response to art-works and architectural objects (both broadly defined), as well as natural wonders (e. ATT hereafter), a tripartite hierarchy is delineated: Aesthetic Awe (AeA), a rare, intense, highly memorable peak experience; the state of Being Moved (BM), a more common and less pronounced experience; and (physiological) Thrills or Chills (ThCh), the most frequently experienced and observed response. The theoretical expectation is that AeA is most reliably induced by a sublime stimulus-in-context. The sublime is, of course, a classical notion in philosophy (Konečni, 2005, 2011). Unlike some ambivalent prior positions, it is considered in ATT to be external to the observer; it is defined, independently of AeA, as a complex stimulus located in a unique setting and characterized by great rarity, beauty, physical grandeur, and, often, inaccessibility. In contrast to many instantiations of non-aesthetic awe (Keltner and Haidt, 2003), ATT stipulates that the experiencer must have existen-tial security for AeA to occur (Konečni, 2005). The pyramids of Giza are the prototypical sublime stimuli. A certain amount of preliminary empirical work on the sublime stimuli has been carried out (Konečni et al., 2007, Experiment 3). In contrast, since the pioneering work of Goldstein (1980) and Panksepp (1995), the comparative ease of experimental control and reliable measurement have made ThCh an increasingly popular research topic—mostly as a response to music (e.g., Benedek and Kaernbach, 2011). It is, however, of interest that whereas there is ample anecdotal and literary evidence that the experiences of AeA may be life-changing events, a series of laboratory experiments by Konečni et al. (2007) failed to demonstrate any effect of music-induced ThCh on participants' mood, self-concept, and altruism (willingness to donate blood). In a study that used positron emission tomography, Blood and Zatorre (2001) found that the occurrence of music-induced ThCh is