David Robson writes:

I am 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 go pick it up and stop it getting 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 to be an especially soppy person, but his words send chills down my neck. I feel something open in my chest and my eyes start prickling.

What I’m feeling is kama muta – an under-recognised 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 for other people,” says Jon Zabala, a 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 marketeers to enhance the emotional impact of their stories. Those of a cynical disposition may find the concept cloying 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 collaborators, the psychologists Thomas Schubert and Beate Seibt. One day, the conversation turned to children’s films and superhero movies. Why, Schubert wondered, did he cry at their endings?

After some thought and discussion, the researchers began to suspect that this immediate, involuntary reaction reflected an emotion that hadn’t been studied scientifically. “All psychologists assumed that crying meant sadness,” says Fiske, yet the tears that Schubert was describing occurred during positive events. In a superhero film, for instance, 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 gather as much information as possible on 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 looking for a term that would neatly describe the emotion they were hoping to capture. After much searching, he settled on kama muta, an old Sanskrit term that means “moved by love”. [Continue reading…]