ABSTRACT
The kama muta construct can be used as the prototype for understanding other social emotions. If sudden intensification of communal sharing evokes kama muta, does the subordinate’s sudden intensification of authority ranking evoke the emotion often denoted by the English vernacular lexeme awe and the German Ehrfurcht? What emotions are evoked by sudden intensification of equality matching or market pricing? What emotions are evoked by the loss or termination of each of the four basic types of relationships? We would also expect specific emotions to be evoked by one’s own violation of each fundamental relational model, and other emotions to be evoked by one’s partners’ violations of each. A systematic functional account of social and moral emotions predicts just such emotions. But we should not assume that any given language has vernacular labels for each of these emotions.
