Harmonizing hearts: High-quality listening and Kama Muta among listeners and speakers.
Abstract
Kama Muta, a relatively new construct, is an emotion of social connection that describes the feeling of being moved to love through five key dimensions. Despite the growing body of research on the beneficial outcomes of Kama Muta, little is known about its antecedents. To fill this gap, this research focuses on the emergence of Kama Muta during social interactions by specifically examining what triggers this emotion in conversations. The theory on Kama Muta suggests it emerges in response to sudden relationship intensification. We propose that, in conversation, this intensification is most likely triggered by high-quality listening. We examined whether high-quality listening, characterized by undivided attention, understanding, acceptance, nonjudgment, and positive intentions, is associated with Kama Muta for both speakers and listeners. Data were collected across three studies (total N = 1,126), employing scenarios (Study 1), recall (Study 2), and live online conversations conducted via Zoom (Study 3). We found general support for our hypotheses. Specifically, both speakers (Studies 1–3) and listeners (Studies 2–3) experiencing high-quality listening reported greater Kama Muta compared to those exposed to lower quality listening. The consistency of these results varied across different dimensions of Kama Muta. This work offers novel insights into a previously unexplored social behavior that can act as an antecedent of Kama Muta and contributes to the listening literature, which has predominantly focused on the effects on speakers. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
The Effect of a Dilemma on the Relationship Between Ability to Identify the Criterion (ATIC) and Scores on a Validated Situational Interview
Gary P. Latham, Guy Itzchakov
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Four experiments were conducted to determine whether participants’ awareness of the performance criterion on which they were being evaluated results in higher scores on a criterion-valid situational interview (SI) where each question either contains or does not contain a dilemma. In the first experiment, there was no significant difference between those who were or were not informed of the performance criterion that the SI questions predicted. Experiment 2 replicated this finding. In each instance, the SI questions in these two experiments contained a dilemma. In a third experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a 2 (knowledge/no knowledge provided of the criterion) X 2 (SI dilemma/no dilemma) design. Knowledge of the criterion increased interview scores only when the questions did not contain a dilemma. The fourth experiment revealed that including a dilemma in a SI question attenuates the ATIC-SI relationship when participants must identify rather than be informed of the performance criterion that the SI has been developed to assess.
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Xiao Chen, Gary P. Latham, Ronald F. Piccolo, Guy Itzchakov
Goal Setting
In this rejoinder, we address three issues discussed in the commentaries on our lead article: possible ethical issues in goal priming in organizational settings, whether goal priming is restricted to routine behaviors, and the relationship of goal priming with self-fulling prophecies and an organization’s climate. Finally, our data were examined by an independent researcher who tested for publication bias.
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