Eric Cullhed

Recent attempts to define being moved have difficulties agreeing on its eliciting conditions. The status quaestionis is often summarized as a question of whether the emotion is evoked by exemplifications of a wide range of positive core values or a more restricted set of values associated with attachment. This conclusion is premature. Study participants associate being moved with interactions with their loved ones not merely for what they exemplify but also for their affective bond to them. Being moved is elicited when we apprehend the value of entities to which we are connected through basic as well as extended forms of affiliative attachment. These comprise people, certain objects, and even abstract entities, including the unshakable life-guiding ideas we call “core values.”

Critics often link yet distinguish between ‘moving’ and ‘touching’ characters, scenes and artworks. It has been argued that being moved is a specific emotion, that its formal object is the thin goodness of exemplified final, important and impersonal thick values, and that being touched is an attenuated form of that phenomenon. First, I dispute that the values that move us must be impersonal, since we can be moved by the personal goodness of being loved, free or healthy. Second, I argue that being touched should be considered a distinct emotion type. To support this claim, I refer to apparent differences between the formal objects that the two affective phenomena relate to as well as to dissimilarities in cognitive sophistication and phenomenology. I suggest that we are touched by that which invites love. Vulnerable, innocently suffering and affectionate beings are touching insofar as they need and will be responsive to love.

This article asks what the graffito incised on the Dipylon oinochoē reveals about the nature of the dance competition that it commemorates. Through a systematic analysis of the evaluative and descriptive meaning of the adjective ἀταλός and its cognates in early Greek epic, it is argued that a narrower definition compared to previous suggestions can be established. The word refers to the carefreeness that is specific to a child or young animal, and its uses typically imply a positive evaluation which is connected not only to the well-being that this carefreeness entails but also to the positive emotion of tenderness and the sentiment of care that it engenders in a perceiver. It is concluded that, when used to specify the criterion by which a dance contest will be adjudicated, the term refers to an aesthetic property that is repeatedly praised in archaic Greek texts in other words: that of dancing with the adorable but short-lived carefree abandon of a child.