Kama muta: Conceptualizing and measuring the experience often labelled being moved across 19 nations and 15 languages.

Abstract

English-speakers sometimes say that they feel "moved to tears," "emotionally touched," "stirred," or that something "warmed their heart;" other languages use similar passive contact metaphors to refer to an affective state. The authors propose and measure the concept of kama muta to understand experiences often given these and other labels. Do the same experiences evoke the same kama muta emotion across nations and languages? They conducted studies in 19 different countries, 5 continents, 15 languages, with a total of 3,542 participants. They tested the construct while validating a comprehensive scale to measure the appraisals, valence, bodily sensations, motivation, and lexical labels posited to characterize kama muta. The results are congruent with theory and previous findings showing that kama muta is a distinct positive social relational emotion that is evoked by experiencing or observing a sudden intensification of communal sharing. It is commonly accompanied by a warm feeling in the chest, moist eyes or tears, chills or piloerection, feeling choked up or having a lump in the throat, buoyancy, and exhilaration. It motivates affective devotion and moral commitment to communal sharing. Although the authors observed some variations across cultures, these 5 facets of kama muta are highly correlated in every sample, supporting the validity of the construct and the measure. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Role of Social Relational Emotions for Human-Nature Connectedness

“…In this context, we highlight the potential of one specific positive emotion, kama muta, (Sanskrit: being moved by love; Seibt et al, 2017;Fiske et al, 2019;Zickfeld et al, 2019), which may be the most crucial social relational emotion in connectedness. Holding a new-born baby in your arm, surprisingly seeing a loved one again after a long time, or unexpectedly receiving a great kindness are typical example of moments in which people experience kama muta.…”

“…Validated measures should be used to facilitate comparison among studies as well as the generalization of findings. For instance, for kama muta, there exists the KAMMUS-Two scale developed by Zickfeld et al (2019) across a variety of contexts, in 19 countries and 15 languages. A well-established and valid questionnaire for gratitude is the Gratitude Questionnaire-6 (GQ-6) (McCullough et al, 2002), and for the emotion awe, the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S) (Yaden et al, 2019).…”

Beliefs About Emotion Are Tied to Beliefs About Gender: The Case of Men’s Crying in Competitive Sports

“…Although the studies presented here provide an initial test of the idea that men's crying (and to a lesser extent, women's) may be viewed most favorably in stereotypically masculine contexts, there remain many important questions to be addressed around this issue. For example, although crying can occur as the result of many different emotions, including sadness, joy, fear, anger, and being "moved" (Vingerhoets, 2013;Zickfeld et al, 2018), the present studies addressed participants' responses only to sad crying scenarios. Given that most research on tears and crying has focused on perceptions of sad tears, little is known about how tears brought about by other emotions are perceived by observers (see MacArthur and Shields, in press).…”

Tears of joy, aesthetic chills and heartwarming feelings: Physiological correlates of Kama Muta

“…According to kama muta theory, appraising sudden increases in communality and closeness (communal sharing) evokes a distinctive positive social relational emotion that motivates devotion to communal relationships. The emotion is often accompanied by tears, chills, and feelings of warmth, and is denoted with terms such as moving, touching, or heartwarming in English vernacular (e.g., Zickfeld, Schubert, Seibt, Blomster, et al, 2019).…”