Think back to a time when you shed a happy tear. Perhaps it was watching your best friends exchange their wedding vows as they embarked on their new life together. You might have been moved by the tale of an extraordinary act of heroism or someone coming to a stranger’s rescue at a time of need. It could have simply been a video of a particularly cute kitten or puppy on social media that tugged at your heartstrings.
In each of these cases you would have been feeling “kama muta”, a new term coined to describe an emotion that was only officially identified by psychologists 13 years ago, but has become the subject of a growing body of research.
Even if you’re not familiar with the expression, you will recognise the emotion. Culturally, kama muta — an old Sanskrit term that means “being moved by love” — lies behind the greatest stories of all time, from Homer’s to Pixar’s, while experts say experiencing it can inspire us to act more altruistically towards those around us, and could even help to heal political divides.
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As you might hope for an emotion centred on human connection, defining the concept of kama muta has been a team effort from researchers spanning much of the globe. Leading the way are Alan Fiske, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles and Thomas Schubert and Beate Seibt of the University of Oslo in Norway.
Their project began in 2013, as the researchers discussed the strange fact that humans often cry at positive events and happy endings, when there would be no obvious reason to feel sad.
Recognising a big hole in the psychological literature, they set about conducting a series of studies to find out. They soon discovered that happy tears are often, as we know, accompanied by other specific physical sensations such as a lump in the throat, a tingle down the back of the neck, goosebumps on the skin and a feeling of warmth in the chest.
According to their early studies, the main catalyst for kama muta appears to be the rapid intensification of a relationship — whether experienced first hand or vicariously. Many people report feeling the emotion when they watch a clip of a soldier returning home to their family, for instance. “[That] kama muta is especially heartfelt because we feel joy and relief along with and in contrast to the horror of imagining that the loved one might not have returned,” Fiske wrote in his book Kama Muta: Discovering the Connecting Emotion.
Videos and images of cute kitten can elicit the emotion
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Given how commonly we experience kama muta — early studies suggested an average of twice a week — you might have assumed that the English language would have a specific label for the emotion, but this is not the case. When talking about their experiences, many of the research participants would use terms that evoke either motion or bodily contact, such as being “moved”, “touched” or “stirred” — yet none of those terms evoke all the characteristics of the emotion in all the circumstances in which it can be felt. The same was true for all the other languages that the researchers studied: “We believe that people feel kama muta about kittens and the cosmos, without being able to give their feeling a name,” they noted, leading them to coin the phrase from Sanskrit.
Continuing research suggests that kama muta doesn’t just feel good but may also lead us to act pro-socially. When feeling the emotion, participants tend to agree with statements such as “I felt like telling someone how much I care about them” or “I wanted to do something extra nice for someone”, suggesting that it evolved in humans to help consolidate our relationships with the people around us. In one study from 2023, US citizens who watched a moving video about volunteers’ efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey reported feeling greater warmth, social closeness and trust towards their political opponents, compared with those who had watched a neutral video about the US currency. And the more strongly someone felt kama muta, the greater their sense of solidarity across the political aisle.
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Feeling kama muta appears to promote a greater sense of meaning in life and helps us to see our personal frustrations in a broader perspective — both of which should enhance our overall wellbeing. Last year German scientists showed that the differences can even be seen in our posture: experiencing kama muta was associated with a significant reduction in body movement, which may leave us feeling more physically grounded.
So why not look for some ways to cultivate the feeling? The researchers’ website — kamamutalab.org — offers a playlist of videos that have been proven to elicit the emotion. Simply engaging in more attentive conversations may also do the trick: according to a study published last year, “active listening” can trigger kama muta in both parties, as we feel our friendship deepening.
Cheesy though it might sound, kama muta is a reminder that love is all around us, if only we choose to notice it.
David Robson is the author of The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life (Canongate)