Karin Kukkonen
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on the page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Karin Kukkonen, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Beate Seibt, Professor of Social Psychology, and our topic is being moved – the particular experience of being moved by reading a book, but also in everyday life. Thank you for joining us, Beate.
Beate Seibt
Thank you, Karin, for having me.
Karin Kukkonen
Shall we start by talking a little bit about this experience of being moved?
Beate Seibt
Yes, let's do that. Being moved is an experience that is actually a lot more common than originally assumed. So, emotion science had this pre-assumption, that there are these basic six emotions – you may have heard of them, the Ekman six emotions, sadness, surprise, anger, et cetera. And there was no space for being moved, so it has been sort of ignored by their emotion research. And when we started asking people, and showing people videos, and asking them to recollect situations when they were moved, a lot came up. And people came to us and said: Oh, I moved so often, several times a day. And we discovered all these Facebook groups and Instagram channels, that are all about being moved. So it's all around us, really.
Karin Kukkonen
And can you say a little bit about what... What does it look like to be moved on Facebook?
Beate Seibt
Being moved lets you want to share this experience with others. So this is one function of positive emotions, that we want to experience them again. And being moved, in particular, it's an interpersonal emotion, so people reach out to others to bind through a common experience of being moved. So people share with their friends and relatives pictures of their own baby, pictures when they were moved by things around their child, for example, pictures of small kittens and puppies – stories of soldier homecoming, where their daughter or son is super moved by their surprise homecoming, for example – and other kinds of stories that are all about beautiful moments, that people can easily picture themselves in. There are subgenres of this, like the cute animals kind of subgenre, or the...
Karin Kukkonen
Are we moved by cat videos...?
Beate Seibt
Yes, we are. Or also the surprise wedding proposal subgenre. And we have done a study, particularly on the cute animals, for example, and found that the responses – of course – range widely from not very responsive at all, to shedding tears, getting goosebumps and everything, just from seeing small kittens interact with each other, play with each other.
Karin Kukkonen
So what does it look like then? If you study that?
Beate Seibt
Well, most of the time we run studies online now, because it has turned out that the advantage you get, from being able to ask many people online in their own home, at their own ease, over bringing them to the lab, and then having only a few people – that you can physically have in the lab – outweighs the disadvantages, that you may have with people being more distracted at home, et cetera. So the data quality is actually quite good, and the tests become very easy over the years, to sample people online, so we distribute our link far and wide, and then collect responses from anonymous people on the net and embed the videos, that we are interested in, in the survey. And most of the times we collect these answers after the stimulus – after showing the video – but in one study, we showed them the videos and concurrently asked them to rate how moved they were during that video. And those answers were very interesting. So there we got more close to the mechanism that we think is responsible for being moved, namely that you'll feel a sudden intensification of closeness with other people, or with cute kittens, or also with God or with whomever. So we could see there, that one group of people was asked about how much people on the screen would increase their closeness, would get close to each other, and another group of people how moved they were during that video. And what we found, when we looked at the two curves, they practically overlapped completely. So especially in those moments when people on the screen, they give each other a hug or get emotionally close to each other, share emotions, or help each other out et cetera. These are also the moments when people get moved and shed a tear, et cetera.
Karin Kukkonen
So that means that getting close on Facebook is actually possible, through these emotional experiences in response to the kind of things that people post?
Beate Seibt
Yes.
Karin Kukkonen
And that – you started off by talking about traditional work in the study of emotions, where you look at fear or anger or sadness, or something like that. And these emotions are – of course – also very prominent on Facebook, especially in emoticons. I'm wondering whether, on the one hand, could you imagine a being moved-smiley or emoticon? Or, on the other hand, is there something so distinctly different about being moved, that it wouldn't actually translate into these more traditional emotion categories?
Beate Seibt
No, I don't think there's something that sets being moved far apart from the others, and there are actually emoticons that people use for being moved. The most common is simply putting hearts. Lots of hearts often, but you also have a face and the superimposed heart. Or a smiling face and a tear. So all these are good representations of what we mean by being moved. It's a positive emotion, so the smile fits, and also, when we record electromyography in the lab...
Karin Kukkonen
And what is that?
Beate Seibt
... So we actually record the muscles of the face, we see that when people are moved, they tend to smile a bit, and they also tend to shed tears. So this coincidence of both positivity, smiling and tears is quite characteristic for being moved.
Karin Kukkonen
And it seems to be a very physical experience as well.
Beate Seibt
Yes, so the heart probably stands for – or can be quite closely linked to – another symptom that people often report, which is that they feel a warmth in the chest when they are moved. This is actually the symptom that is most reported for being moved-episodes. In general, we tend to be most able to share being moved with close ones, people we are already close with, but we can also get quite moved by strangers.
Karin Kukkonen
And then create that closeness through the feeling.
Beate Seibt
Yes – then, for a moment, feel very connected to, for example, a beggar who behaves nicely.
Karin Kukkonen
So far, we've been talking about Facebook and cat videos and social media. Which of course is a... You know, as a cultural technology, as a way in which we communicate with each other... But of course, there are other cultural technologies – through history – which we have used to create Kama muta, as you call it, or being moved, as I guess it's more commonly known? Such as, for example, literature. Could you talk a little bit about how being moved might... well, on the one hand, how it might be represented in literature, or also how it might be generated by literature?
Beate Seibt
Yes, let me take a little step back and introduce this term, that I've briefly mentioned, this Kama muta term. More properly, the reason we call the emotion actually not being moved, but Kama muta, is that people use being moved – the term – in a fuzzy sense... and the term has different connotations, also, in different languages. So, by using a technical term for this, we can say: Kama muta is this emotion that you feel, when you suddenly get close to another person or being. And, when you shed a tear and feel warmth in the chest, et cetera. And people may well say "being moved", when they are intensely sad, for example, and people do that. And we say well, this is not then the realm of our Kama muta theory.
Karin Kukkonen
So it allows you to put a frame around that particular experience.
Beate Seibt
Yes, it's a way of talking scientifically about this, and being able to make scientific distinctions that may be more precise than the distinctions that you would make in everyday language. So, to get back to your question then, Kama muta through literature: Yes, of course, I mean, before we had Facebook, we had hundreds of years of literature, and that was the primary...
Karin Kukkonen
... Thousands.
Beate Seibt
...Thousands of years! And that was the primary mediated way of people to get their emotions – be empathic with people, strangers, getting access to other people's stories. And there we think that there was, like, a coevolution of literature and being moved. Such as, those who are very successful in evoking being moved, but also other emotions, they become authors, and they write, and they get read, and their books get bought. People like to get emotional through literature, to experience emotions by reading literature. And of course also to be educated and other things, but the ability of literature to evoke emotions, I think, is a central aspect of why we read literature and what makes literature dear to us.
Karin Kukkonen
We talked a little bit about what being moved looks like. When you look at it in a lab, you ask these questions, you measure people's facial movement, that kind of thing. Would you like to speculate on where one might find that in literature?
Beate Seibt
One thing that comes to mind, certainly, is drama and tragedy, but also romance. And different plotlines that are about lovers, for example, getting together – or not getting together, Romeo and Juliet for example, where the plot is about a love that's difficult. So you build up a hope, that this love could exist and materialise and be consumed, but at the same time you also fear that it may not be. So this makes you very emotionally engaged.
Karin Kukkonen
Even though you – of course – know how it ends. When you go to a tragedy, you don't expect a happy ending. Might one think about this, being moved, as also motivation to – you know – go to things that... to see a drama, where you're not going to have a happy ending?
Beate Seibt
Yes, I believe so. It's – I mean, I have not completely thought this through yet. How to think about these tragic endings, how they relate to Kama muta. Because... they are mostly sadness, but of course along the lines of this plot, you have lots of Kama muta. You feel with the lovers, and you are happy for that love, and it's a strong force, and you feel that this is a strong force also in your life. So identifying with lovers, people who intensely feel tenderly passionate about other people, that I think is Kama muta. Why so often these end tragically in literature, I don't know. You are the expert, haha.
Karin Kukkonen
Well, they don't always end in tragic ways. I mean, you can't watch cat videos all day. It could be something similar that you can't have... If you have the ultimate b-story, it's the ultimate boring story, isn't it? So you need to have some kind of conflict, you need to have some kind of drama, to even have a plot, to even have a story worth telling. If I were to say, well, you know, everything is fine at home, who cares? So I think there is something that's – yeah, to do with conflict and drama that we want to have in literature, that we can very well live without in our everyday life. So, that would be a way in which literature is actually quite different from everyday life – or, that the kinds of things that we're looking for in literature is quite different. Whereas, presumably, being moved is something that we seek out both in literature and more everyday contexts.
Beate Seibt
Yes, I would assume so. And probably the kind of Disney or Hollywood adaptations of literature, they often give a tragic ending also a positive twist, so that they end with a happy ending.
Karin Kukkonen
So they can make a sequel. Kama muta is, or being moved is, of course... I mean, especially if we're talking films, is of course something that's often linked to the ending of the film, or to the ending of the story. What would a perfect ending, I mean, in being moved terms look like?
Beate Seibt
So, what we have seen so far with the videos, that we have mainly used as stimuli, is that a good build up – a bit back and forth, and some tragic elements in the middle – help promote the strength of the emotion in the end. And then really dwelling on the Kama muta resolution of conflicts helps, where, for example, cutting back and forth between a potential negative ending and then the reunification, that was the Kama muta highlight of the story, helps people feel more strongly. So I think there's something very interesting in this, in entertaining different possibilities on how a story could end, that can drive their emotional engagement, and thereby also their Kama muta feeling at the end of a story, that ends with Kama muta.
Karin Kukkonen
OK, so there we have the recipe: Show how badly things could go, if you don't get the Kama muta ending, and then dwell on that, and give it a big wide shot screen so everyone can enjoy it.
Beate Seibt
Yes.
Karin Kukkonen
Before we close the conversation, I wanted to ask you if you had a recommendation. I assume many people, who listen to this podcast, both like reading and enjoy being moved. So do you have a recommendation for a book, that one could read for the experience of being moved?
Beate Seibt
Books usually are complex emotional stimuli, if we use a more technical term, so it would – maybe – make a slightly boring book, if it only was after evoking Kama muta. But I can say that, what I... yeah, maybe recommend a little booklet, that I picked up recently, by Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby. It's... like a loose collection of stories from her life, and what made me moved there was that I could very strongly identify with her. So she has a great gift, of making you understand her perspective and see the world through her eyes – also emotionally. So, I could really feel what she felt, including being moved, but I was also moved about feeling so close to her during these – what seemed very honest – descriptions of situations, both triumphant and sad situations.
Karin Kukkonen
Thank you so much for introducing us to being moved, Kama muta, for taking us all the way from Facebook walls and cat videos to high drama and Rebecca Solnit's essay collection.
Beate Seibt
Thank you for having me.
Karin Kukkonen
Thanks to everyone listening to the podcast as well. Our next episode will air in about two weeks, and we look forward to having you then.