Abstract
This study deals with just a emotion of emotions. When we see good movies or wonderful landscapes, read heart-warming stories, our hearts are frequently moved. This phenomenon evokes fairly certain emotions. However, it has hardly been studied in psychology. Many researches by the author were reviewed in order to investigate and elucidate mechanisms of evoking emotional responses of “Kandoh (the state of being emotionally moved)”. On the basis of these researches, first, the various types of “Kandoh” are categorized, and secondly a comprehensive process model is proposed. The outlines of this model are as follows. It is suggested that event related knowledge and information are very important factors for an audience (that is spectators, listeners, viewers, readers, and so on) to become highly involved, and then high involvement states elicit psychological and physiological stress. Therefore, desirable developments of a story produce stress reduction or relaxation, and finally people evoke “Kandoh”. Based on these results, some characteristic aspects of our cognitive system and some significance of emotional responses of “Kandoh” are discussed.
