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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........

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