Objectives
Experiences of "being moved" can be intense emotional episodes that involve strong feelings for others, crying and goosebumps, and social motives. We investigate the basis of this emotion in social relations using a variety of measures from social psychology and anthropology.
Outcomes
We have discovered that kama muta is a universal emotion that is experienced as positive and motivating. Please visit our project page kamamutalab.org to learn more about our research, as well as our full publication list.
Background
Kama muta is the sudden feeling of oneness, love, belonging, or union with an individual person, a family, a team, a nation, nature, the cosmos, God, or a kitten. People often describe the emotion as "being moved", but they also use other terms, such as heartwarming. When intense, kama muta is accompanied by tears, a warm feeling in the chest, and goosebumps. We investigate experiences of kama muta using Relational Models Theory (Fiske, 1992).
Financing
The project has been supported financially by internal funding from the Department of Psychology.
Group members
The kama muta research group consists of:
Alan Fiske, UCLA [Google scholar]
Beate Seibt, University of Oslo [Google scholar]
Thomas Schubert, University of Oslo [Google scholar]
Evi Petersen, University of South-Eastern Norway, and OsloMet
Janis Zickfeld, Aarhus University [Google scholar]
Jan Wiecha, Jagellonian University Kraków [ResearchGate]
Anders Herting, University of Oslo
David Grüning, University of Heidelberg [Google scholar]
Anette Åbom, University of Oslo
José Pizarro, Universidad del País Vasco [Google scholar][orcid]
Jonna Vuoskoski [Google scholar]
past lab members:
Olivia Pich home
Kamilla Steinness home
Kimberly Holtz linkedin
Johanna Lyshol Blomster, linkedin [Google scholar]
Diana Lizarazo, CEPI vaccines [linkedin]
Rami Rmeileh, University of Exeter [linkedin]
Tools
We use the resources of the research group for this project, in particular the psychophysiology lab and the online survey tool Qualtrics.