I is about 20 minutes into my conversation with the psychological anthropologist Alan Fiske when he starts talking about a lost kitten. “If you saw it outside, you would pick it up and stop it from being run over by a truck, check if it’s hungry and make sure it’s warm and safe,” he says. “Your heart goes out to it.”
I’m not an ardent cat lover, and I don’t consider myself a particularly soppy person, but his words send chills down my neck. I feel something open in my chest and my eyes begin to sting.
What I feel is kinda – an under-recognized emotion that has been the focus of Fiske’s work for more than a decade. According to Fiske and his colleagues, kama muta evolved to bind us to others and strengthen our relationships. “It motivates you to embrace and care about other people,” says Jon Zabalaa researcher at the University of the Basque Country.
We experience it at some of the most important events of our lives – births, weddings and funerals – and it is commonly exploited by writers, directors and marketers to amplify the emotional impact of their stories. Those of a cynical nature may find the concept sleazy and sentimental, but the latest research suggests that kama muta can be a powerful force in politics.
Fiske’s interest in kama muta began more than 10 years ago, during a working holiday in Norway with his two friends and colleagues, the psychologists Thomas Schubert and Beat Seibt. One day the conversation turned to children’s movies and superhero movies. Why, Schubert wondered, did he weep over their endings?
After some thought and discussion, the researchers began to suspect that this immediate, involuntary response reflected an emotion that had not been studied scientifically. “All psychologists assumed that crying meant sadness,” says Fiske, but the tears Schubert described during positive events occurred. For example, in a superhero film, you are less likely to cry when the superhero is crushed and defeated than when his friends come to save him – a moment of hope. “We were just so intrigued by this emotion that we started studying it,” says Fiske, who is based at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Their first challenge was to collect as much information as possible about people’s experiences of the emotion and when they experienced it, through in-depth interviews, experiments and ethnographic observations. At the same time, Fiske began searching for a term that would neatly describe the emotion they hoped to describe. After much searching, he settled on kama muta, an ancient Sanskrit term meaning “moved by love”.
This initial research revealed a series of characteristics that together would define emotion as a scientific construct. Kama muta, the researchers argued, is a brief and positive (or bittersweet) feeling often described with metaphors depicting movement such as being “moved” or “stirred.” It is accompanied by a warmth in the chest, goosebumps on the skin, chills in the neck and tears in the eyes, and occurs during the sudden intensification of “communal sharing relationships” – with friends, family, lovers or members of the same community.
The triggers can vary greatly. “The classic example we use is that you have this old friend that you haven’t seen in ages, and then suddenly you reunite,” says Janis Zickfeldan assistant professor at the University of Aarhus and co-author with Schubert, Seibt and Fiske. But there is many other assignments. It could be your elderly neighbor who makes you soup when you are sick. You may hear a poet describe hardships you have experienced. Or you might be at a memorial for military heroes and the sacrifices they made for you and your country. In each case, the goosebumps and tears stem from the enhanced connection you either witness or experience yourself.
Kama muta strengthens our commitment to our relationships and encourages us to act with greater compassion and kindness, both towards the person or people who provoked the feeling, and more generally. “It helps you appreciate the relationships you have,” says Fiske. “The feeling may only last 30 seconds or a minute, but the motivation continues.” This is the reason, he says, that we might feel like hugging a stranger at a concert; kama muta may be behind Swifties’ habit of handing out friendship bracelets to other fans.
Fiske found that descriptions of kama muta felt instantly familiar to most people, even if they had never heard the term or definition. “It was quite obvious to realize that people have emotions that they don’t know they have,” he says. “I’ve never given a speech about this where people said, ‘I don’t recognize what you’re talking about.’
By 2018, Fiske and his colleagues concluded an enormous survey of kama muta in 19 countries – including the US and UK, Germany, Portugal, India, China and Japan. In some cases, the researchers asked people to recall an episode in their life that caused “positive tears.” In others, the team showed participants various videos depicting some type of relationship enhancement, such as a montage clip of a couple kissingfrom young adulthood to old age. Participants then had to fill out a detailed questionnaire about the experience.
After these prompts, the participants were much more likely to report feeling the various elements of kama muta described above, compared to when they were encouraged to consider sad, amusing or awe-inspiring events – confirmation that the team on ‘ hit a viable psychological construct that sits apart from those better known emotions.
The fact that kama muta was recognizable in every country should not be surprising: caring relationships are a basic human need and therefore it is natural that we have developed an emotion that motivates us to maintain them. When people felt kama muta, they were more likely to agree with statements such as: “I felt like telling someone how much I cared about them”; “I wanted to hug someone”; or “I wanted to do something extra nice for someone”.
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Zickfeld’s later research found that participants’ skin temperature around the chest rose slightly after watching videos that evoked kama muta, suggesting that the clips were almost literally “heartwarming.” Interestingly, however, the participants’ heart rate and breathing rate tended to drop after feeling the emotion. “It can be something that soothes your body,” says Zickfeld. “You have a [momentary] increase in arousal and then the feeling brings it back to the baseline.”
Storytellers across time invoked kama muta to captivate audiences. Fiske believes that we can trace it back to Odysseus’ return home to Ithaca after 20 years of turmoil, and his eventual reunion with his wife. “It is clear from the text that they feel this emotion,” he says. Today, many people report that they experience this when Wall-E reunites with Eve in the 2008 romantic sci-fi film.
Kama muta is also evident in countless viral tracks. Cute cat videos are just one repetition as their vulnerability triggers our parental instincts. A study by Kamilla Knutsen Steinnes at Oslo Metropolitan University found that the kittens’ cuteness is directly correlated with the intensity of the kama muta experienced by participants. “You fall in love with the kitten,” says Fiske. “YouTube is this vehicle for kama muta. People post these videos because they enjoy experiencing this emotion, and the people who watch them then want to share it.” His personal favorite is an ad for Extra Gum called The story of Sarah and Juanabout a high school couple. “Kama muta is about marketing,” says Fiske.
Mental health professionals began to take note of the emotion’s potential to heal the psyche. Krystina Alessandrini, a lecturer at the Integrative Institute for Counseling and Psychotherapy, Dublin, says that very small human gestures – such as making the client a cup of tea, or walking together outside – can disproportionately influence people’s responses to therapy. influenced. “The clients feel touched by these moments of connection,” she says. “And they seem to really make a difference to them in their healing processes.” His interviews with other therapists about their experiences with clients, and their own experiences in therapy, suggest that kama muta may be behind this. “It often had this kind of motivational effect … It made people connect with others in the same way that their therapist connected with them.”
Other researchers were interested in the ways in which certain rituals can evoke kama muta in large groups. Zabala recently investigated people’s experiences of the Korrika festivalwhich involves an uninterrupted relay race across the historical territory of the Basque Country. The baton contains a message, written in Euskara, the Basque language, and the race is often accompanied by music and speeches. “It symbolizes the legacy of Euskara – that Euskara does not stop, and does not disappear as long as there are speakers who practice it.” As you might expect, the communal experience strengthens people’s feelings of shared identity with other Euskara speakers – and this is mediated by the kama muta feeling during the ceremony.
Politicians can use this to their advantage, with studies finding this Democratic and Republican campaign ads in the 2016 presidential election, kama muta incited among their supporters – and increased their intention to vote. However, with the right messages, the emotion can help heal political divisions. One recent experiment found that invoking kama muta tended to improve Republicans’ views of Democrats and vice versa. The videos don’t have to be overtly political; the romantic Sarah and Juan clip from the chewing gum commercial helped people feel more confident in their political rivals. However, the greatest effects were generated by videos that combined kama muta with a sense of national pride – such as e.g. Ray Charles’ performance of America the Beautiful before the baseball World Series, a few weeks after 9/11.
More than a decade after his first discussions on the subject, Fiske now considers himself an “expert” on the emotion in all its flavors. “I put myself in the way of it and I stop to notice when I have it,” he says. “One of the nice things about discovering this emotion is that you can enjoy it… When you feel it, you realize that you are a loving person, and that other people love you.”
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David Robson is the author of The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Lifepublished by Canongate (£18.99). To the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
