Being moved by meaningfulness: appraisals of surpassing internal standards elicit being moved by relationships and achievements

ABSTRACT

People can be moved and overwhelmed, a phenomenon typically accompanied by goose-bumps and tears. We argue that these feelings of being moved are not limited to situations that are appraised as pro-social but elicited when someone surpasses an internal standard. In line with these predictions, people were moved by relationships and success (Study 1), by reunion, separation, success and failure (Study 2) and by social, environmental and sports achievements (Study 3). In all three studies, the elicitation of these feelings was partially mediated by appraisals of surpassing social or achievement standards. In line with this, ratings of meaningfulness were closely associated with feelings of being moved and moving stimuli elicited behavioural intentions such as spending time with family and friends, helping others and/or achieving something in life. Thus, moving situations may remind us about what we perceive as meaningful and thereby help us to act accordingly.

KEYWORDS:

• Appraisals
• being moved
• elevation
• awe
• chills
• values

Acknowledgement

We want to thank Marina Fischer for the data collection of Study 3. This research was conducted in accordance with the declaration of Helsinki. We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations and all measures in the studies. We share the data, preregistration and questionnaires via OSF (osf.io/xqmrt).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Geneva Appraisal Questionnaire (GAQ) includes appraisals of compatibility with internal standards (i.e. the actions that produced the event were morally and ethically acceptable; was your behaviour consistent with the image you have of yourself? did you think that real or potential consequences of the event were or would be unjust or unfair? Geneva Appraisal Questionnaire, 2002). For appraisals of surpassing social standards, we reframed the first item as a positive deviation from a social standard and constructed two additional appraisals similar to that (i.e. morally and ethically praiseworthy behaviour; strong bonds between people; humanities better nature). For appraisals of violating social standards, we used shortened versions of the first and third GAQ item and constructed an additional item similar to that (i.e. behaviour that is morally and ethically inacceptable; unfair behaviour; how people hate each other). We did not include the second GAQ item as it refers to the emoter's behaviour and hence does not apply to participants’ third-party perspective in the present studies.

2 Sensitivity analysis (1 – β = .80, α = .05) with gpower was conducted for all three studies. Results revealed that the ANOVAs in Study 1 (N = 109, three groups), Study 2 (N = 228, five groups) and Study 3 (N = 190, two groups, six measurements) can detect medium differences between groups (η² = .08, .05, and .06 for the three studies respectively). The moderation analysis in Study 1 (N = 35 per condition), Study 2 (N = 45 per condition) and Study 3 (N₁ = 110, N₂ = 80) can detect large interaction effects (|slope| = .86, .76 and .53 for the three studies respectively). For the mediation analysis in all three studies, we relied on Monte Carlo simulation by Ma and Zeng (2014). Their simulations indicate that multiple mediation models, N = 100, 1 – β = .80, α = .05, can detect medium indirect effects of .29 and larger.

3 The original Moral Identity Scale includes the description as a person as Caring, Compassionate, Fair, Friendly, Generous, Helpful, Hardworking, Honest, Kind. However, to distinguish moral identity from achievement motivation, we dropped the word Hardworking.

4 Reliability of the achievement motivation scale from the Personality Research Form were low in both studies, although the reliability of that scale was acceptable with α = .70 in the general population (Stumpf et al., 1985). The reliability of that scale seems to be sensitive to small sample sizes and/or the meaning of the items changed over the last 30 years.

5 Previous research that studied the effect of emotion induction on cooperation found small effects of elevation on donation (${\eta }_p^2$ = .04 [.00; .11], Thomson & Siegel, 2013, Study 2) and a small effect of awe on cooperation in a dictator game (${\eta }_p^2$ = .03 [.00; .07], Piff et al., 2015, Study 3). Ketelaar and Tung Au (2003) found a medium effect of guilt on cooperation (${\eta }_p^2$ = .09 [.01; .21]) though replications of this study found such an effect for a subsample of relatively non-cooperative participants only (de Hooge, Zeelenberg, & Breugelmans, 2007; Nelissen & Dijker, 2007).

6 The hypothesis for the interaction between context and values on being moved was preregistered for the reunion, separation and success contexts only. The stimuli for these contexts were rated to show the respective principle in a pretest (see supplemental material). However, in this pretest moving failure clips were rated to show success and/or a social context in addition. Therefore, we did not formulate a specific hypothesis for the association between values and being moved by failure but preregistered that we explore which values predict being moved by failure.

7 Goal-conduciveness and goal-obstructiveness were also assessed for persons other than the self (i.e. the situation had positive/negative consequences for others). However, as these appraisals are neither part of the Geneva Appraisal Questionnaire (GAQ) nor clearly distinguishable from pro-social appraisals, we did not include them in the analysis.

8 Previous studies on being moved did not compare moving contexts with control conditions but focused on the association of being moved and specific appraisals within moving contexts (Seibt et al., 2017; Seibt, Schubert, Zickfeld, & Fiske, 2018; Seibt, Schubert, Zickfeld, Zhu, et al., 2018; Schubert et al., 2018). In research on moral elevation, however, moving stimuli are compared with control conditions. For instance, Schnall et al. (2010) compared reactions to elevating and funny clips and found large effects on being moved, ${\eta }_p^2$ = .26 [.10; .40] and warm feelings in the chest, ${\eta }_p^2$ = .35 [.18; .48]. The effects in the present study were comparably large or even stronger.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Heinrich–Böll–Stiftung to the first author.