ArticleFrontiers in psychology2019
Too Cute for Words: Cuteness Evokes the Heartwarming Emotion of Kama Muta.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Cute Communication: Can Cute Discourse Be Used in Risk Communication?Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Psychometric evaluation of the Geneva Sentimentality Scale in Chinese college students.PsyCh journal · 2025Article
- Social media emotions annotation guide (SMEmo): Development and initial validity.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Lorenz's classic 'baby schema': a useful biological concept?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- So cute, I could wait: the effect of cuteness on consumer patience.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Moral Beauty During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prosocial Behavior Among Adolescents and the Inspiring Role of the Media.Communication research · 2023Article
- Is two cuter than one? number and relationship effects on the feeling of kawaii toward social robots.PloS one · 2023Article
- The construct of cuteness: A validity study for measuring content and evoked emotions on social media.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Wildlife Photos on Social Media: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Conservation Organisations' Instagram Images.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- A Special Class of Experience: Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Review
- The Influence of Infant Schema Cues on Donation Intention in Charity Promotion.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A configuration of infantile attributes including a large head, large eyes, with a small nose and mouth low on the head comprise the visual baby schema or Kindchenschema that English speakers call "cute." In contrast to the stimulus gestalt that evokes it, the evoked emotional response to cuteness has been little studied, perhaps because the emotion has no specific name in English, Norwegian, or German. We hypothesize that cuteness typically evokes kama muta, a social-relational emotion that in other contexts is often labeled in English as being moved or touched, heartwarming, nostalgia, patriotic feeling, being touched by the Spirit, the feels, etcetera. What evokes kama muta is sudden intensification of a communal sharing (CS) relationship, either CS between the person and another, or CS between observed others. In accord with kama muta theory, we hypothesize that a kama muta response to cuteness results from a sudden feeling of CS with the cute target. In colloquial terms, the perceiver adores the cute kittens and their heart goes out to them. When a person perceives cute targets interacting affectionately - that is, intensifying CS between them - this should strengthen a kama muta response. We experimentally investigated these predictions in two studies (
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