Kama Muta is A New Name for An Old Emotion

While the emotion is part of our human experience, this is the first time it's been scientifically studied

Hiya!

We’ve spent the last few centuries hyper-focused on scientifically understanding our shared, objective, external world to the detriment of our individual subjective experiences, which are significantly harder to measure or even describe. In some ways, we know more about our planet than ourselves.

Take our emotions, for example. It seems like a self-explanatory topic; after all, everyone experiences joy, fear, and sadness — but those are only three of many. When we look closer, it’s clear that emotions are complicated and can be tricky to identify and decipher. In fact, sometimes we feel emotions we can’t name, and maybe that’s because there isn’t one, or at least not a well-known one — like kama muta.

What is Kama Muta?

As is often the case with emotions, kama muta is challenging to put into words. So, rather than trying to describe it, I’ll share a story Alan Fiske, a psychological anthropologist at The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told David Robson of The Guardian about a lost kitten that might allow you to feel it for yourself.

“If you saw [a lost kitten] 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. Your heart goes out to it.”

Even if you aren’t a cat lover or consider yourself particularly emotional, there’s something about Fiske’s kitten scenario that stirs something in our chests, and the stirring turns to twisting at the thought of anything bad happening to the kitten. And that, my friend, is kama muta.

Fiske has studied this under-recognized emotion for over a decade. While most people have never heard the term kama muta before and can’t recall any other name for the emotion, Fiske’s descriptions of the kama muta feel instantly familiar. Fiske explained to Robson:

“It’s been quite eye-opening to realise that people have emotions that they don’t know they have. I’ve never given a talk about this where people have said: ‘I don’t recognise what you’re talking about.’”

The Curiosity

Ten years ago, while visiting Norway, Fiske and his two friends/collaborators, Thomas Schubert and Beate Seibt, both psychologists at the University of Oslo, Norway, were discussing superhero and children’s movies when Schubert wondered why he cries at their endings.

It may seem almost a silly question at first, but think about it for a minute, and it’s less silly. After all, why do we cry at the end of some movies? Fiske told Robson, “All psychologists assumed that crying meant sadness,” but the tears Schubert described happened during positive events in the films. The example Robson provides is that we’re less likely to cry when the superhero is defeated than when their friends come to save them.

After further discussion and deep thought, the researchers grew curious whether the experience, which appears to be an immediate and involuntary reaction, might be an emotion that hadn’t been scientifically studied yet. So they decided to.

The Research

To learn more about this mysterious emotion, the researchers needed to figure out what to call it and gather as much information as possible about when and how people experience it.