Moment-to-moment changes in feeling moved match changes in closeness, tears, goosebumps, and warmth: time series analyses

ABSTRACT

Feeling moved or touched can be accompanied by tears, goosebumps, and sensations of warmth in the centre of the chest. The experience has been described frequently, but psychological science knows little about it. We propose that labelling one’s feeling as being moved or touched is a component of a social-relational emotion that we term kama muta (its Sanskrit label). We hypothesise that it is caused by appraising an intensification of communal sharing relations. Here, we test this by investigating people’s moment-to-moment reports of feeling moved and touched while watching six short videos. We compare these to six other sets of participants’ moment-to-moment responses watching the same videos: respectively, judgements of closeness (indexing communal sharing), reports of weeping, goosebumps, warmth in the centre of the chest, happiness, and sadness. Our eighth time series is expert ratings of communal sharing. Time series analyses show strong and consistent cross-correlations of feeling moved and touched and closeness with each other and with each of the three physiological variables and expert-rated communal sharing – but distinctiveness from happiness and sadness. These results support our model.

KEYWORDS:

• Being moved
• crying
• goosebumps
• time series
• relational models
• kama muta

Acknowledgements

We thank Nick Haslam for comments on the analytic strategy and Niels van de Ven for helpful advice. Author contributions: All authors contributed to the design of the study. TS and JZ developed the materials and planned the analysis. JZ ran the study, aggregated the data, and ran the analyses. TS and JZ wrote the first draft, and all authors revised the manuscript.

ORCID

Thomas W. Schubert http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3797-4568

Notes

1. It has also been argued that feeling moved or touched is associated with motivation to identify and empathize more with others. Because we do not investigate motivation in the present study, we do not discuss it here.

2. Consequently, in this manuscript, we use the terms “feeling moved/touched” and “being moved/touched” only when referencing other work that used those terms, and when referring to our actual measures that used these terms. When we denote the emotion (a scientific concept), we call it “kama muta.”

3. Communal sharing should not be confused with other notions of social sharing, although these are important – see the General Discussion.

4. Note that we are not aiming to map the denotations of being moved and touched or similar terms in English or other languages. There certainly are situations in which people say that they are moved or touched that do not fit our concept kama muta, and there are definitely instances of kama muta that people do not label being moved or touched.

5. For exploratory purposes not relevant to the present hypotheses, at the end participants also answered questions on mood, arousal, trait empathy, and a 10-item personality survey. We will not report these data here.

6. We used the CCF command in SPSS 22. Computationally, CCF is identical to Pearson’s correlation coefficient. We use the abbreviation CCF instead of r to emphasize that we report correlations among aggregated time series, where the units of analysis are the units of time in the series.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by funding by the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo.