15 documents found, page 1 of 2

Tears of joy, aesthetic chills and heartwarming feelings: physiological correla...

Situations involving increased closeness or exceptional kindness are often labeled as moving or touching and individuals often report bodily symptoms, including tears, goosebumps and warmth in the body. Recently, the kama muta framework has been proposed as a cross-cultural conceptualization of these experiences. Prior research on kama muta has mostly relied on subjective reports. Thus, our main goal of the pre...

The sudden devotion emotion: kama muta and the cultural practices whose functio...

When communal sharing relationships (CSRs) suddenly intensify, people experience an emotion that English speakers may label, depending on context, “moved,” “touched,” “heart-warming,” “nostalgia,” “patriotism,” or “rapture” (although sometimes people use each of these terms for other emotions). We call the emotion kama muta (Sanskrit, “moved by love”). Kama muta evokes adaptive motives to devote and commit to t...

Too cute for words: cuteness evokes the heartwarming emotion of kama muta

A configuration of infantile attributes including a large head, large eyes, with a small nose and mouth low on the head comprise the visual baby schema or Kindchenschema that English speakers call “cute.” In contrast to the stimulus gestalt that evokes it, the evoked emotional response to cuteness has been little studied, perhaps because the emotion has no specific name in English, Norwegian, or German. We hypo...

Touching the base: heart-warming ads from the 2016 U.S. election moved viewers ...

Some political ads used in the 2016 U.S. election evoked feelings colloquially known as being moved to tears. We conceptualise this phenomenon as a positive social emotion that appraises and motivates communal relations, is accompanied by physical sensations (including lachrymation, piloerection, chest warmth), and often labelled metaphorically. We surveyed U.S. voters in the fortnight before the 2016 U.S. elec...

Data from the Human Penguin Project, a cross-national dataset testing social th...

In the Human Penguin Project (N = 1755), 15 research groups from 12 countries collected body temperature, demographic variables, social network indices, seven widely-used psychological scales and two newly developed questionnaires (the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) and the Kama Muta Frequency Scale (KAMF)). They were collected to investigate the relationship between environm...

The human penguin project: climate, social integration, and core body temperature

Social thermoregulation theory posits that modern human relationships are pleisiomorphically organized around body temperature regulation. In two studies (N = 1755) designed to test the principles from this theory, we used supervised machine learning to identify social and non-social factors that relate to core body temperature. This data-driven analysis found that complex social integration (CSI), defined as t...

“Kama muta” or ‘being moved by love’: a bootstrapping approach to the ontology ...

The emotion that people may label being moved, touched, having a heart-warming experience, rapture, or tender feelings evoked by cuteness has rarely been studied and is incompletely conceptualized. Yet it is pervasive across history, cultures, and contexts, shaping the most fundamental relationships that make up society. It is positive and can be a peak or ecstatic experience. Because no vernacular words consis...

The best loved story of all time: overcoming all obstacles to be reunited, evok...

Friendly touch increases gratitude by inducing communal feelings

Communion among people is easily identifiable. Close friends or relatives frequently touch each other and this physical contact helps identifying the type of relationship they have. We tested whether a friendly touch and benefits elicit the emotion of gratitude given the close link between gratitude and communal relations. In Study 1 we induced a communal mindset and manipulated friendly touch (vs. non-touch) a...

Crisis as seen by the individual: the Norm Deviation Approach

This paper presents a conceptual proposal applied to social, environmental and health crisis appraisal and coping: the Norm Deviation Approach. It is focused on the individual level and its interaction with the context within which a threat (or threats) has emerged. Thus far our understanding of the psychosocial processes that occur at the individual level during crises is a clear lacuna in the risk and crisis ...