Who is moved to tears easily? Individual differences in Kama Muta proneness and their relation to personality

The term “Kama Muta” (Sanskrit, “being moved by love”) describes the feeling of being emotionally touched or moved. Even though the scholarly literature on Kama Muta is growing, little is known about individual differences in experiencing this emotion. Are some people more prone to experiencing Kama Muta than others? And if so, by which personality traits are those people characterized? In this preregistered online study (N = 263), we assessed individual differences in both the frequency (via self-reports) and the intensity (via emotional responses to eight Kama Muta stimulating videos) of Kama Muta. The two measurements were internally consistent and positively correlated, indicating that individuals systematically differed in their Kama Muta proneness and that these individual differences could be captured reliably. The results further showed that Kama Muta was associated with traits from different domains (e.g., empathy, affect-related traits, spirituality, motive dispositions) with most of them being interpersonal in nature.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Personality Science

• Publication date

  2025-06-01

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/27000710251359515
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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