Kama Muta: The Powerful Emotion Everyone Has But No One Has Heard Of

For you, it may have been a similar experience that provoked the emotion. Perhaps not; maybe your most recent experience with kama muta came at a sports game, cheering your team on with 10,000 fellow fans. Perhaps you felt it watching a rom-com or sharing a meal with a friend. 

There are, it turns out, many things that can make you feel it. “Most people we talk to have that emotion,” says Thomas Schubert, professor of social psychology at the University of Oslo. “Most cultures we look at know this emotion.”

And that’s odd, right? After all, for most of us, kama muta is probably not a very familiar turn of phrase. But the concept is “nothing new,” Schubert tells IFLScience – it’s just a new name for something that is, as it turns out, pretty fundamental to humanity itself.

To pin down an emotion

It’s a feeling shared by, presumably, all of humanity – or at least, in every society the kama muta researchers have looked at so far. And yet, almost as universal as the experience itself is the lack of an exact word to describe it: “it’s telling, actually, that the usual English term for this is ‘being emotional’,” Schubert says. “People don’t really understand that this is a thing on its own.”

A good analogy is umami, he says. It’s a word that was barely heard outside of its native Japan before the mid-’80s, with no exact English equivalent. That’s despite it describing something truly fundamental – it’s one of only five basic tastes our tastebuds can pick up.

Nowadays, of course, we know it well – it’s the brothy, sometimes meaty taste you find in soy sauce, mushrooms, cheeses, and so many other foods. But try to describe that flavor even 50 years ago, and you’d be forced to go for something like “savory”, Schubert points out. 

“It’s kind of the same thing as ‘emotional’,” he says. “It’s so unspecific.”

Kama muta, on the other hand, is highly precise. There are physiological symptoms: tears, goosebumps, an urge to throw your hands to your chest. “And it always makes you feel like going to call your grandmother and saying how wonderful she is, and hugging somebody,” Alan Fiske adds. “It evokes an emotion of caring and love.”

“We find that once people have heard about it, they recognize it right and left in their lives,” he tells IFLScience. “And it’s kind of transformative, because now suddenly you have a name for something that you felt, and you might not have had any name for it.”

Discovery

“We didn’t have a name for it at first, which was kind of surprising,” says Beate Seibt, a professor of psychology at the University of Oslo and, like Fiske and Schubert, a researcher in the Kama Muta Lab. “We thought we knew about emotional literature, but we couldn’t name it.”

It wasn’t only a vernacular problem. “In the standard emotion literature and theory […] there are six basic emotions, right?” Seibt explains. “And then there are supposed secondary emotions that are more ‘fluffy’ and don’t have specific physiological symptoms.”

But with kama muta, she says, “I felt, here’s an emotion that has a clear physiological response profile – with the tears, with the goosebumps, things that we can report on, observe, measure. And it’s not in [psychologist and emotion researcher Paul] Ekman’s list, and it’s not been written about a lot. So that piqued my interest.”

Eventually, though, research won out. A few papers, dotted throughout the mid-20th century, seemed to get close to defining this mysterious feeling – some using one term, some using another. But one stuck out: kama muta, a Sanskrit term translating to “being moved by love”. 

And that’s why you pay, by the way. That’s why you buy tickets to Pixar movies – because you know they’re going to evoke this emotion.

Alan Fiske

Don’t be fooled by its ancient appearance, though. “The name, I invented,” says Fiske. “We borrowed the words from Sanskrit – but Sanskrit speakers didn’t ever talk about this.”

That’s not so unusual, he points out – after all, even his own discipline, psychiatry, is named after two ancient Greek terms that were never used in combination until the 19th century. But in a field dominated by Latin and Greek, though, it’s a notable etymological choice.

So, why Sanskrit? It’s partly aesthetic, Fiske admits: “It’s kind of poetic,” he tells IFLScience. “And I love the script that that Sanskrit is written in.” 

But there’s a more practical reason for the ancient choice. “Words in any one language don’t map one to one on experiences – or anything,” Fiske explains. It’s why we use Latin for binomial nomenclature – we use Pholcus phalangioides rather than “daddy long-legs”, for example, because the latter is simply not very specific (in fact, the name “daddy long-legs” can mean easily half a dozen different types of organism depending on where you say it.) 

With emotions, the problem can only be worse – after all, at least with a bug, you’ve something to point at. So, “if I called it ‘being moved’, […] then there are arguments about what that phrase means,” Fiske explains. “And that’s… a question for dictionary makers. It’s not a psychological question.”

“A scientific construct needs a scientific name,” he says. “One that’s unambiguous.”

The feeling of the thing

Linguistic nuances aside, though, what sensation are we actually talking about here? It’s not exactly love, though there is some overlap; it’s not quite affection or happiness, though these, too, can feel similar to the “new” emotion. In truth, zeroing in on a firm definition is hard to do at first – “you really get it more easily when you have a chance to experience it,” Seibt tells IFLScience.

Luckily, there’s little doubt that you have. In fact, you’re very familiar with this emotion already, even if you didn’t know the name of it: “Kama muta is our name for the emotion that you probably call ‘being moved’,” says Schubert.

Technically, it’s a sudden intensification of what’s known as a communal sharing relationship – it’s that heartwarming rush of something that you feel when your newborn baby reaches out to you for the first time, or you see a stranger’s joyful proposal across the room. 

“You don’t even know these people, but you feel it,” Fiske explains. It even works with cartoons, he points out: “It could be WALL-E and Eve, who are imaginary digital things,” he tells IFLScience. “They’re not real, and even if they were real, they still wouldn’t be – they’d just be machines.” 

“But you know, when WALL-E recognizes Eve, and the love they have – you really do feel it, watching it,” he says. “And that’s why you pay, by the way. That’s why you buy tickets to Pixar movies – because you know they’re going to evoke this emotion.” 

But just as “sad” can refer both to the emotion of getting a B in math when you were hoping for an A, and also the overwhelming grief of losing a life partner in a sudden accident, so too does kama muta exist on a spectrum. This is something you can feel towards a stranger who helps you find your way in a new city, Fiske says, but it can also be the mania of a political rally or the ecstasy of a religious experience. It “can be what we call love in a romantic way, or in a parental way, or even just a friendly way,” Fiske explains; “we’ve had students go to a Sufi mosque, and a Pentecostal church, and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, in each case kind of worried about whether they’d be welcome there. And then, when they are made welcome, they feel this emotion.”

“It seems almost blasphemous to say, well, when I’m worshiping in the mosque and when I’m watching a Pixar movie, I have the same emotion,” he admits. “Well, the emotion means different things in those different contexts – but at some deeper level, it is the same emotion.”

The source and the side effects

In a way, humanity seems addicted to kama muta. We seek it out – we buy those movie tickets; we watch videos of kittens or soldiers coming home; hell, we even set up elaborate bonding rituals in front of friends and family, all just to prompt this feeling in ourselves and others. 

A wonderful use of it, I think, is Churchill’s Wartime radio speeches, where I think people felt this sense of connection and unity. But Hitler probably was evoking this when he was organizing the brownshirts and making people feel proud of Germany.

Alan Fiske

“There are so many institutions and practices, in every culture that we’ve looked at, whose function in some sense is to evoke this emotion,” Fiske tells IFLScience. “We discovered that accidentally. We stumbled into it.”

Of course, for a species as social as ours, that’s perhaps not hugely surprising. But the origins of kama muta may go way further back than that, Fiske says: “I think this evolved over millions of years,” he tells IFLScience, “out of something emotion-like that all female mammals have, which is the feeling of love for their babies when their babies are born.”

It takes a lot to raise a baby, Fiske points out. “The mother has got to put aside the pain, and the fear, and the exhaustion that she feels having given birth,” he says, “and, you know, put her life on the line for these babies. That requires a very strong motivation.”

It’s not foolproof, he stresses – not every mother will immediately feel that starry-eyed love for the screaming red gremlin that just forced itself out of her body. “But if on the average, mammalian, avian mothers didn’t feel this, there would be no animals or birds,” Fiske says.

But scale that instinct up through a few million years’ worth of frontal lobe evolution, and the result is kama muta – an ability to bond not just with those you share DNA with, but with practically anybody and anything. It can be what motivates people to fight for the conservation of nature, or save abandoned animals; it can be what keeps you sober in rehab, or inspires the Odyssey.

At the same time, it can fuel revolutions. It can empower fascists.

“A wonderful use of it, I think, is Churchill’s Wartime radio speeches, where I think people felt this sense of connection and unity,” Fiske tells IFLScience. “But Hitler probably was evoking this when he was organizing the brownshirts and making people feel proud of Germany. And, you know, God forbid, it led to the rise of Nazism.”

Where now?

After spending millennia without even a name, it’s perhaps a mark of impatience to demand immediate breakthroughs from kama muta. This is, it seems, an emotion that demands you to take your time with it.

“We spent a couple of years of work on just defining kama muta, and understanding it,” Schubert tells IFLScience. “Figuring out when it happens, what the symptoms are. That was, I think, the first five years or so.”

But as researchers’ familiarity with the emotion grows, so too does their list of questions about it. “What does it really do in the real world? Can we use it for anything?” offers Schubert. “Can you or do people use it spontaneously? When does it happen in therapy? What role does it play in alliances?”

No doubt many of us – particularly those in advertising or politics – already feel familiar with some of those questions. After all, we’ve all seen that one commercial that makes us cry; the Pixar short that tugged at the heartstrings, or the politician whose speeches stirred something inside us to action. But that’s just the experience of kama muta – it’s not the process, or the creation, or the culture behind it.

“I’m interested primarily in the psychology and the cultural aspects of this,” Fiske tells IFLScience, “and you can go an awfully long way without knowing anything about the chemistry of it, and without knowing what parts of the brain are active and so forth.” 

But “I would really like to know something about the chemistry of it,” he says. “If we understand the chemistry of it, [that] will help us understand the phylogenetic evolution.”

It is, it seems, a subject with much left to discover. And, luckily, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

“It’s always fun to talk about kama muta. I’ve done lots of research that I really enjoy, and it’s exciting, but there’s nothing more fun of all the things I’ve done,” Fiske tells IFLScience.

“I don’t know if it’s the most important – although I think it is quite important,” he says. “But it’s certainly fun.”