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High-quality listening can evoke a powerful emotion called Kama Muta: feeling moved by love.

Listeners and speakers both experience emotional closeness when attention is present and warm.

In workplaces, high-quality listening fosters a culture of companionate love and trust.

Listening is not love, but it reliably creates the emotional conditions in which love can grow.

Something strange happens when someone truly listens to you. Not the polite, waiting-my-turn kind, but the kind where you feel another person actually tracking your thoughts, interested in where they lead. It can stop you mid-sentence. It can make you tear up. And sometimes, it creates a warmth so sudden you don't quite have a name for it.

That nameless feeling turns out to have a name after all: Kama Muta.

I first encountered this concept through the work of Alan Fiske and colleagues, who drew on the Sanskrit phrase meaning "moved by love" to describe what happens when a social bond suddenly intensifies. Not romantic love, necessarily, but that feeling of warmth when you realize someone genuinely cares. When you feel, all at once, less alone. It's the sensation of being touched, of goosebumps, of wanting to pull someone closer. It's common, it's powerful, and English doesn't really have a word for it.

In my laboratory, we wondered whether listening might be one of the things that triggers it. We ran three studies to find out. Across different methods, imagined conversations, recalled interactions, and live Zoom exchanges between strangers, we kept finding the same thing. When people experienced high-quality listening, they were more likely to feel moved. More communal closeness. More warmth. More of that ineffable sense of being known.

What surprised us was that this didn't only happen to the person being listened to. Listeners felt it too.

There's something about genuinely attending to another person, really trying to understand them, not just waiting for your turn to speak, that changes the emotional texture of a conversation for both parties. In our live study, strangers talked for ten minutes. That's not long. But when the listening was attentive, both the speaker and the listener reported being moved by the connection. Ten minutes with a stranger, and something crossed the threshold into Kama Muta.

Why? I think it comes down to what attentive listening communicates at a level below words. It signals that you're safe. That your thoughts won't be judged. That whoever is across from you finds you worth attending to. When that signal comes through, especially in a world where it's rarely this clear, the relational bond doesn't just grow slowly. It jumps.

That jump is precisely what Kama Muta describes.

In a second line of research, we asked a broader question: can listening change the emotional culture of an entire organization? Across four field studies, we found that employees who felt genuinely listened to by coworkers, following a listening training, were more likely to perceive their workplace as one characterized by companionate love: care, tenderness, a sense that colleagues actually notice how you're doing.

This matters more than it might sound. Companionate love in the workplace predicted greater well-being, higher resilience, stronger commitment, and more cooperation. The environment people perceived themselves to be in, whether it felt warm and caring or cold and indifferent, tracked closely with how much listening was happening.

Why Relationships Matter

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Kama Muta and companionate love are different things. One is a momentary flash; the other is a slow-grown culture. But the same mechanism seems to underlie both. Listening signals to people that they matter, that their inner life, their ideas, their stress, their joy, are worth someone else's attention. And when that signal gets repeated, across conversations and relationships and months, it accumulates into something you might reasonably call love.

None of this means that listening is love. You can listen carefully to someone you don't particularly like. And you can love someone you've barely heard from in years. The two things are not identical.

But what the research suggests is that listening is one of the most efficient paths to the conditions under which love, in its many non-romantic forms, can actually form. Genuine attention creates safety, and safety creates vulnerability, and vulnerability opens the door to real connection. The feeling of being moved that follows isn't sentimental. It's the nervous system registering that something real just happened between two people.

So the next time you're in a conversation and find yourself composing your response while the other person is still talking, you might want to pause. Not for their sake alone. But when listening actually lands, you're the one who might end up moved.

Saluk, D., Janam, D., Itzchakov, G., DeMarree, K. G., & Venezia, A. (2025). Harmonizing hearts: High-quality listening and Kama Muta among listeners and speakers. Emotion, 25(8), 1879–1896. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001555

Itzchakov, G., Barsade, S., & Cheshin, A. (2025). Sowing the seeds of love: Cultivating perceptions of a culture of companionate love through listening and its effects on organizational outcomes. Applied Psychology, 74(1), e12582.‏

Reis, H. T., Regan, A., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2022). Interpersonal chemistry: What is it, how does it emerge, and how does it operate?. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(2), 530-558.‏

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