Neither sadness nor joy: this is kama muta, the indescribable emotion that we all feel at some time in our life

Humans have possessed the ability to express themselves through language starting at least 135,000 years ago according to a study by researchers at MIT. However, even with all that time to evolve there are some things for which we just don’t have the exact words.

We have the expression ‘moved to tears’ but you aren’t crying because you are sad, because what you experienced or saw was somethine positive. However, neither are you feeling joy exactly but you were ‘emotionally touched’.

What you saw or experienced ‘warmed you heart’ and ‘stirred’ something inside of you. The question of what the emotion behind this feeling is prompted a group of researchers to investigate it and they came up with ‘kama muta’.

Kama muta: “being moved by love”

Alan Fiske, a psychological anthropologist at UCLA, told The Guardian that roughly ten years ago he was on a working holiday in Norway talking with his friends and collaborators Beate Seibt and Thomas Schubert at the University of Oslo. They began discussing children’s films and superhero movies, and Schubert wondered why he always cried at their endings.

They realized that this was something that hadn’t been thoroughly studied, so they set about doing so. While plowing into that endeavor though they needed a name for this emotion and after searching high and low Fiske found it in Sanskrit.

In Sanskrit Kama is love and muta is moved, thus Kama muta – means “being moved by love,” states the group of scientists from psychology and anthropology on the website for Kama Muta Lab, which was established in 2018 to study this emotion.

“Kama muta is a distinct positive social relational emotion”

They published their first findings on kama muta in 2018 after extensive research across 19 different countries, 5 continents, 15 languages and over 3,500 participants.

The data collected showed 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,” states the paper. “It motivates affective devotion and moral commitment to communal sharing.”

Below is one of the videos that the Kama Muta Lab uses in their studies.

In later research, Janis Zickfeld, lead author of the study, found that after watching videos that evoke kama muta, participants’ skin temperature around the chest would slightly increase, thus the idea that something is ‘heartwarming’ is pretty much literally true. He thinks that feeling kama muta could be something that actually “soothes” one’s body as participants’ heart and breathing rates tended to drop after the emotion has passed.

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