Cláudia Simão

Friendly touch increases gratitude by inducing communal feelings

Communion among people is easily identifiable. Close friends or relatives frequently touch each other and this physical contact helps identifying the type of relationship they have. We tested whether a friendly touch and benefits elicit the emotion of gratitude given the close link between gratitude and communal relations. In Study 1, we induced a communal mindset and manipulated friendly touch (vs. non-touch) and benefit to female participants by a female confederate. We measured pre- and post-benefit gratitude, communal feelings, and liking toward the toucher, as well as general affect. In Study 2, we manipulated mindset, friendly touch and benefit, and measured the same variables in female pairs (confederate and participants). In both studies the results showed a main effect of touch on pre-benefit gratitude: participants who were touched by the confederate indicated more gratitude than those not touched. Moreover, benefit increased gratitude toward a confederate in the absence of touch, but not in the presence of touch. Additionally, perceiving the relationship as communal, and not merely liking the confederate, or a positive mood mediated the link between touch and gratitude. The results further support a causal model where touch increases communal feelings, which in turn increase gratitude at the end of the interaction, after having received a benefit from the interaction partner. These results support a broader definition of gratitude as an emotion embodied in communal relationship cues.

Gratitude Depends on the Relational Model of Communal Sharing

We studied the relation between benefits, perception of social relationships and gratitude. Across three studies, we provide evidence that benefits increase gratitude to the extent to which one applies a mental model of a communal relationship. In Study 1, the communal sharing relational model, and no other relational models, predicted the amount of gratitude participants felt after imagining receiving a benefit from a new acquaintance. In Study 2, participants recalled a large benefit they had received. Applying a communal sharing relational model increased feelings of gratitude for the benefit. In Study 3, we manipulated whether the participant or another person received a benefit from an unknown other. Again, we found that the extent of communal sharing perceived in the relationship with the stranger predicted gratitude. An additional finding of Study 2 was that communal sharing predicted future gratitude regarding the relational partner in a longitudinal design. To conclude, applying a communal sharing model predicts gratitude regarding concrete benefits and regarding the relational partner, presumably because one perceives the communal partner as motivated to meet ones needs. Finally, in Study 3, we found in addition that being the recipient of a benefit without opportunity to repay directly increased communal sharing, and indirectly increased gratitude. These circumstances thus seem to favor the attribution of communal norms, leading to a communal sharing representation and in turn to gratitude. We discuss the importance of relational models as mental representations of relationships for feelings of gratitude.

Kama Muta: Similar Emotional Responses to Touching Videos Across the United States, Norway, China, Israel, and Portugal:

Ethnographies, histories, and popular culture from many regions around the world suggest that marked moments of love, affection, solidarity, or identification everywhere evoke the same emotion. Based on these observations, we developed the kama muta model, in which we conceptualize what people in English often label being moved as a culturally implemented social-relational emotion responding to and regulating communal sharing relations. We hypothesize that experiencing or observing sudden intensification of communal sharing relationships universally tends to elicit this positive emotion, which we call kama muta. When sufficiently intense, kama muta is often accompanied by tears, goosebumps or chills, and feelings of warmth in the center of the chest. We tested this model in seven samples from the United States, Norway, China, Israel, and Portugal. Participants watched short heartwarming videos, and after each video reported the degree, if any, to which they were “moved,” or a translation of this term, its valence, appraisals, sensations, and communal outcome. We confirmed that in each sample, indicators of increased communal sharing predicted kama muta; tears, goosebumps or chills, and warmth in the chest were associated sensations; and the emotion was experienced as predominantly positive, leading to feeling communal with the characters who evoked it.

Changes in social emotion recognition following traumatic frontal lobe injury

Changes in social and emotional behaviour have been consistently observed in patients with traumatic brain injury. These changes are associated with emotion recognition deficits which represent one of the major barriers to a successful familiar and social reintegration. In the present study, 32 patients with traumatic brain injury, involving the frontal lobe, and 41 age- and education-matched healthy controls were analyzed. A Go/No-Go task was designed, where each participant had to recognize faces representing three social emotions (arrogance, guilt and jealousy). Results suggested that ability to recognize two social emotions (arrogance and jealousy) was significantly reduced in patients with traumatic brain injury, indicating frontal lesion can reduce emotion recognition ability. In addition, the analysis of the results for hemispheric lesion location (right, left or bilateral) suggested the bilateral lesion sub-group showed a lower accuracy on all social emotions.