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