The emotion you never knew you had, and how to feel more of it
SOURCE:New Scientist
The warm and fuzzy emotion of kama muta underlies vital feel-good experiences like social connection and feeling part of something bigger. But are you getting enough of it?
Dan Hall/Kintzing
You are holding your newborn in your arms and gazing into their beautiful eyes; you’re waiting in an airport for a family member to return from a year-long trip and suddenly see them walking towards you; or you are sitting in a sports stadium as your team holds its trophy after years of struggle. In each case, you feel a profound sense of connection swell up inside you, your skin breaks out in goosebumps and your eyes fill with tears.
Sound familiar? You may not know the term, but that feeling is “kama muta”, a newly named emotion that is of increasing interest to psychologists. It marks some of the most important moments in our relationships with our family, friends and the wider community. By consciously seeking out opportunities to provoke this feeling, you could imbue your life with greater meaning and enhance your sense of social connection.
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It all began in 2012, with a conversation between Alan Fiske, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues Thomas Schubert and Beate Seibt, both now at the University of Oslo in Norway. Why, they wondered, do we start crying at films with happy endings? Until that point, psychologists had mostly focused on tears as a sign of sadness.
The informal discussion soon morphed into a serious academic enquiry, beginning with lengthy interviews and questionnaires about people’s strong emotional reactions to positive events. Soon, the team found a cluster of characteristics. Firstly, the descriptions were often given in terms of motion, such as being “moved”, “stirred”, “transported” or “elevated”. Secondly, it was accompanied by specific physical sensations, including teary eyes, goosebumps, a brief pause in breathing and warmth in the chest. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it seemed to be triggered by the intensification of some kind of social relationship.
This feeling may arise in many different contexts – when a parent cares for their child, as two lovers reunite or two friends share their secrets. To get a feel for the full range of experiences, the researchers cast their nets far and wide. One of their students attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, for instance, and found the feeling often arose from the unconditional acceptance offered by other members.
“Instead of feeling alone and totally miserable about who you are and what you’ve done, you find this terrible moment in your life connects you intimately with other people,” says Fiske.
This reaction can also arise during religious devotion such as prayer, where someone may feel a strong connection with a deity. It is a common response to communal events like sports matches, where you may feel enormous admiration or pride for your team after a struggle for victory, or a memorial where you give thanks to the people who sacrificed their lives for your country.
Live music can invoke the feeling of being “moved by love”
Andrew Chin/Getty Images
As rich as the English language may be, we simply don’t have a single term to cover these experiences. As a result, we often fail to recognise the shared characteristics of the emotion across different situations. “That’s the radical argument that we’re making,” says Fiske. “That it is the same emotion.”
He and his colleagues borrowed a term from Sanskrit: kama muta, which means “being moved by love”. “The Sanskrit phrase just seemed so poetic,” says Fiske.
He sometimes describes it as the feeling of “love igniting” and says it may have evolved to ensure that we care for the people who matter most to us. In prehistory, our social ties would have been essential for our survival, after all, and emotions that strengthened those bonds would have offered us a distinct advantage. Social connection is a huge factor in human health and survival today. Like other “self-transcendent” emotions, such as awe, kama muta may help us to gain more perspective on our lives, which improves our overall well-being.
How to seek out kama muta
Thanks to our extraordinary capacity for empathy, we can experience kama muta vicariously, by watching videos of others – and this seems to translate across cultures. During one study by Fiske and his colleagues, participants from the US, Norway, China, Israel and Portugal were shown videos, such as a clip from a documentary film where a lion is reunited with its former carers. Sure enough, these short films depicting intense moments of connection were considerably more likely to trigger kama muta than those showing more mundane social situations.
“ Social connection is a huge factor in human health and survival “
These experiments suggest kama muta may have important consequences, such as increasing people’s motivation to build and maintain relationships. After feeling the emotion, participants give higher ratings to statements such as “I felt more strongly committed to a relationship” and “I wanted to hug someone”, for instance.
People often experience kama muta during concerts, thanks to the beauty of the music and the feeling of unity. “People will walk up to strangers in the lobby and say: ‘Excuse me, but can I hug you?’” says Fiske. Taylor Swift fans may not be surprised: during the record-breaking Eras tour, it was common for Swifties to exchange friendship bracelets with the people around them.
Some people are especially prone to feeling kama muta, and this seems to be related to their empathic concern. But in everyday life, we might all learn how to cultivate more of the emotion by lending a more attentive ear to the people around us.
“When people are listened to well, they tend to feel more comfortable with their listener, and they may end up self-disclosing more and also self-reflecting more,” says Kenneth DeMarree, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo in New York state. This, he suggests, promotes the rapid development of a relationship, which should trigger the feeling of kama muta.
Watching videos of kittens can provoke kama muta
E+/Getty Images
DeMarree recently put this to the test in a series of collaborations with conversation experts at the University of Haifa in Israel. In one study, the researchers set up a Zoom call between two strangers, one of whom was asked to share a personal experience with the other person. In another, they were asked to recall a conversation from the past or imagine one in the future.
In each case, a sense of attention and acceptance resulted in those familiar feelings of love igniting. When the listening was higher quality, the participants felt more kama muta. Plus, it turns out, it didn’t make a difference whether they were the one listening or being listened to. “The simple conversations that we engage in on a daily basis have the potential to really foster meaningful connections, if we listen well,” says DeMarree.
There are many other ways to experience kama muta, even if you are alone. Reading or watching love stories may be an obvious choice, but watching cute cat videos seems to do the trick, as your heart goes out to a vulnerable creature that needs your protection.
Actively and deliberately cultivating the emotion can transform your view of yourself. In the past, we might have deliberately suppressed the feeling. “You might think, ‘oh God, I’m not going to get emotional’,” says Fiske. “But knowing about this emotion and that everyone feels it, that licenses you to savour it.”
Like all emotions, kama muta has many elements that include physical sensations, mental interpretations of what we are feeling, and a motivation to act in a certain way. To measure people’s experiences of kama muta, researchers use the Kama Muta Multiplex Scale.
Try out our quiz inspired by the research, by watching a video of a kitten, for example, or something else in anthropologist Alan Fiske’s kama muta video playlist. Or try looking at photos of loved ones or having a meaningful conversation with a friend. Then, to work out whether you felt kama muta, rate how accurate the following responses are, for you, on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 6 (a lot).
Section 1
Did you experience…
Moist eyes
Tears
Goosebumps or hair standing up
Chills or shivers
A warm feeling in the centre of your chest
Some feeling in the centre of your chest
Feeling choked up
A lump in the throat
Difficulty speaking
A smile
Feeling buoyant or light
Feeling refreshed, energised or exhilarated
Section 2
Did you feel…
An incredible bond
An exceptional sense of closeness
A unique kind of love springing up
An extraordinary feeling of welcoming or being welcomed
Section 3
Did you feel…
The urge to tell someone how much you care about them
Like you wanted to hug someone
The urge to do something extra nice for someone
More strongly committed to a relationship
Section 4
Did you…
Have positive feelings
Section 5
On the whole, did you feel the experience…
Was heartwarming
Moved you
Touched you
There is no definitive number that means you felt or didn’t feel kama muta, but the researchers say that the higher you score on all these sections, the stronger your experience of kama muta.
