Solo Sikoa’s WrestleMania woes continue following an innocent mistake by the legendary Great Muta Despite headlining SummerSlam and Survivor Series he’s set to miss the WrestleMania card for the third year in a row Jacob Fatu—once Sikoa’s enforcer—has secured a title match at WWE’s biggest event in his first year with the company the wrestling gods had one more rib for Sikoa WWE Hall of Famer The Great Muta is in Las Vegas for WrestleMania weekend Muta crossed paths with some of WWE’s current stars it was a case of mistaken identity for the Japanese legend and the former Tribal Chief Muta posted a picture with Sikoa—confusing him for Sikoa’s older brother “I met with my father RIKISHI during the day something got lost in Google’s translation—Rikishi is Sikoa’s dad While the mix-up added to Sikoa’s WrestleMania woes, he still has a chance to turn things around this weekend. On Friday’s SmackDown, Randy Orton issued an open challenge for WrestleMania Sunday This could be Sikoa’s shot to finally build his WrestleMania legacy after a breakout 2024 a sense of solidarity… There’s a name for that feeling and its manifestations – from Swifties handing out friendship bracelets to strong responses to political messaging – can bring good and ill I am about 20 minutes into my conversation with the psychological anthropologist Alan Fiske when he starts talking about a lost kitten you would go pick it up and stop it getting run over by a truck and make sure it’s warm and safe,” he says and I don’t consider myself to be an especially soppy person I feel something open in my chest and my eyes start prickling What I’m feeling is kama muta – an under-recognised emotion that has been the focus of Fiske’s work for more than a decade. According to Fiske and his colleagues, kama muta evolved to bind us to others and strengthen our relationships. “It motivates you to embrace and care for other people,” says Jon Zabala a researcher at the University of the Basque Country Kama muta enhances our commitment to our relationships and encourages us to act with greater compassion and kindnessWe experience it at some of the most important events of our lives – births and funerals – and it is commonly exploited by writers directors and marketeers to enhance the emotional impact of their stories Those of a cynical disposition may find the concept cloying and sentimental but the latest research suggests that kama muta can be a powerful force in politics Fiske’s interest in kama muta began more than 10 years ago, during a working holiday in Norway with his two friends and collaborators, the psychologists Thomas Schubert and Beate Seibt the conversation turned to children’s films and superhero movies After some thought and discussion, the researchers began to suspect that this immediate, involuntary reaction reflected an emotion that hadn’t been studied scientifically. “All psychologists assumed that crying meant sadness,” says Fiske, yet the tears that Schubert was describing occurred during positive events you are less likely to cry when the superhero is crushed and defeated than when his friends come to save him – a moment of hope “We were just so intrigued by this emotion that we started studying it,” says Fiske who is based at the University of California Their first challenge was to gather as much information as possible on people’s experiences of the emotion and when they experienced it Fiske began looking for a term that would neatly describe the emotion they were hoping to capture an old Sanskrit term that means “moved by love” Meet cute: pictures of kittens tend to provoke feelings of kama muta Photograph: Jasenka Arbanas/Getty ImagesThis initial research revealed a series of characteristics that would together define the emotion as a scientific construct is a brief and positive (or bittersweet) feeling that is often described with metaphors depicting motion such as being “moved” or “stirred” It is accompanied by a warmth in the chest chills down the neck and tears in the eyes and occurs during the sudden intensification of “communal sharing relationships” – with friends The triggers may vary widely. “The classic example that we use is that you have this old friend whom you haven’t seen in ages, and then you suddenly reunite,” says Janis Zickfeld, an assistant professor at Aarhus University and co-author with Schubert, Seibt and Fiske. But there are many other prompts It could be your elderly neighbour making you soup when you are ill You might hear a poet describe hardships that you have experienced Or you may be at a commemoration for military heroes and the sacrifices they have made for you and your country the goosebumps and tears arise from the enhanced connection that you are either witnessing or experiencing for yourself Kama muta enhances our commitment to our relationships and encourages us to act with greater compassion and kindness both towards the person or people that have provoked the feeling “It helps you appreciate the relationships that you have,” says Fiske “The feeling may last only 30 seconds or a minute but the motivation endures.” It’s the reason that we might feel like hugging a stranger at a concert; kama muta may lie behind Swifties’ habit of handing out friendship bracelets to other fans Fiske has found that descriptions of kama muta feel instantly familiar to most people even though they have never heard the term or definition before “It’s been quite eye-opening to realise that people have emotions that they don’t know they have,” he says “I’ve never given a talk about this where people have said: ‘I don’t recognise what you’re talking about.’” Participants then had to fill in a detailed questionnaire about the experience the participants were far more likely to report feeling the different elements of kama muta described above compared with when they were encouraged to contemplate sad amusing or awe-filled events – confirmation that the team had hit upon a viable psychological construct that sits apart from those better-known emotions Taylor Swift fans – or Swifties – and their frienship bracelets at a stadium gig Photograph: Guy Corbishley/AlamyThe fact that kama muta was recognisable in every country should not be surprising: caring relationships are a basic human need and so it is natural that we have evolved an emotion that motivates us to maintain them they were more likely to agree with statements such as: “I felt like telling someone how much I care about them”; “I wanted to hug someone”; or “I wanted to do something extra-nice for someone” Zickfeld’s later research found that participants’ skin temperature around the chest rose slightly after watching videos that evoked kama muta suggesting that the clips were almost literally “heartwarming” the participants’ heart rates and breathing rates tended to drop after feeling the emotion “It could be something that soothes your body,” Zickfeld says “You have a [momentary] increase in arousal and then the feeling brings it down again to the baseline.” “Kama muta is all over marketing,” Fiske says suggest that kama muta may lie behind this “It often had this kind of motivational effect… It made people want to connect to others in the same way that their therapist had connected with them.” which involves an uninterrupted relay race across the historical territory of the Basque Country and the race is often accompanied by music and speeches “It symbolises the legacy of Euskara – that Euskara does not stop and does not disappear as long as there are speakers who practise it.” As you might expect the communal experience strengthens people’s feelings of shared identity with other Euskara speakers – and this is mediated by the kama muta felt during the ceremony More than a decade after his first conversations on the topic Fiske now considers himself to be a “connoisseur” of the emotion in all its flavours “I put myself in the way of it and I stop to notice when I have it,” he says “One of the lovely things about discovering this emotion is that you can savour it… When you feel it David Robson is the author of The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life, published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025 The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media the next generation of the company’s original direct-thread MUTA suppressor line A lot has changed since the original release in 2021 so it only makes sense that Bushmaster would update this suppressor using modern design and manufacturing techniques to offer shooters up-to-date improvements in ergonomics and performance With the added benefits of being lighter and more compact Bushmaster also says the MUTA II BM556 is quieter Check out TFB’s article on the release of the original Bushmaster MUTA BM556 and BM30. The MUTA II body is 3D-printed from Inconel 625 offering lightweight construction without sacrificing ruggedness and longevity The suppressor features a tough Cerakote finish and is purpose-built to dissipate heat quickly and efficiently The MUTA II is the shortest and lightest dedicated 5.56 suppressor from Bushmaster to date an outer diameter of 1.675 inches and 1.815 inches at the flare Bushmaster promises the MUTA II delivers exceptional accuracy and repeatability without excessive bulk and weight where you don’t need it While the MUTA II is about more than simply reducing noise Bushmaster reports a reduction in sound signature on 5.56 NATO and .223 Remington rounds of 14.0% at the left ear The MUTA II BM556 is full auto-rated and user-serviceable with a threaded front cap and removable baffle stack for easy cleaning and maintenance The muzzle end is threaded 1/2x28 for standard AR-15 and 5.56 applications with no barrel length restrictions Here’s another feature you might appreciate The Bushmaster MUTA II BM556 has an MSRP of $709.95 making it a great deal considering its features and construction The MUTA II BM556 sounds interesting and has a unique aesthetic to the suppressor I’d love to get my hands on one and report back that it is everything Bushmaster it promises to be A long-time fan of the company since childhood Let us know your thoughts in the comments below For more information on Bushmaster firearms, suppressors, parts, and accessories, visit bushmaster.com | DTOE = Darwin's Theory on Everything | Instagram More by Darwin N. Thank you!We have emailed you a PDF version of the article you requested You can also addto your safe senders list to ensure you never miss a message from us IFLScience HomeKama Muta: The Powerful Emotion Everyone Has But No One Has Heard OfComplete the form below to listen to the audio version of this article IFLScience needs the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time For information on how to unsubscribe, as well as our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, check out ourPrivacy Policy IFLScience HomeJoin for Exclusive Dr. Katie Spalding Facebook emailKatie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. Facebookemail EditedbyKaty EvansKaty Evans Facebook emailKaty is Managing Editor at IFLScience where she oversees editorial content from News articles to Features Image credit: Kristina Rudkevica/Shutterstock The last time I experienced kama muta was – rather fittingly, as it turned out – while I was conducting an interview about kama muta. Alan Fiske, a psychological anthropologist at UCLA and researcher in the international institution-spanning Kama Muta Lab was telling me a story about his grandson as a toddler it may have been a similar experience that provoked the emotion Perhaps not; maybe your most recent experience with kama muta came at a sports game cheering your team on with 10,000 fellow fans Perhaps you felt it watching a rom-com or sharing a meal with a friend. There are, it turns out, many things that can make you feel it. “Most people we talk to have that emotion,” says Thomas Schubert, professor of social psychology at the University of Oslo “Most cultures we look at know this emotion.” kama muta is probably not a very familiar turn of phrase But the concept is “nothing new,” Schubert tells IFLScience – it’s just a new name for something that is in every society the kama muta researchers have looked at so far almost as universal as the experience itself is the lack of an exact word to describe it: “it’s telling that the usual English term for this is ‘being emotional’,” Schubert says “People don’t really understand that this is a thing on its own.” It’s a word that was barely heard outside of its native Japan before the mid-'80s That’s despite it describing something truly fundamental – it’s one of only five basic tastes our tastebuds can pick up sometimes meaty taste you find in soy sauce But try to describe that flavor even 50 years ago and you’d be forced to go for something like “savory” “It’s kind of the same thing as ‘emotional’,” he says Kama muta, on the other hand, is highly precise. There are physiological symptoms: tears, goosebumps, an urge to throw your hands to your chest. “And it always makes you feel like going to call your grandmother and saying how wonderful she is, and hugging somebody,” Alan Fiske adds “It evokes an emotion of caring and love.” “We find that once people have heard about it they recognize it right and left in their lives,” he tells IFLScience because now suddenly you have a name for something that you felt and you might not have had any name for it.” “We didn’t have a name for it at first, which was kind of surprising,” says Beate Seibt a professor of psychology at the University of Oslo and “We thought we knew about emotional literature “In the standard emotion literature and theory […] there are six basic emotions “And then there are supposed secondary emotions that are more ‘fluffy’ and don’t have specific physiological symptoms.” here’s an emotion that has a clear physiological response profile – with the tears And it’s not in [psychologist and emotion researcher Paul] Ekman’s list Eventually, though, research won out. A few papers, dotted throughout the mid-20th century, seemed to get close to defining this mysterious feeling – some using one term, some using another. But one stuck out: kama muta, a Sanskrit term translating to “being moved by love”. That's why you buy tickets to Pixar movies – because you know they're going to evoke this emotion “We borrowed the words from Sanskrit – but Sanskrit speakers didn't ever talk about this.” is named after two ancient Greek terms that were never used in combination until the 19th century But in a field dominated by Latin and Greek Fiske admits: “It’s kind of poetic,” he tells IFLScience “And I love the script that that Sanskrit is written in.” […] then there are arguments about what that phrase means,” Fiske explains “A scientific construct needs a scientific name,” he says what sensation are we actually talking about here though there is some overlap; it’s not quite affection or happiness zeroing in on a firm definition is hard to do at first – “you really get it more easily when you have a chance to experience it,” Seibt tells IFLScience you’re very familiar with this emotion already even if you didn’t know the name of it: “Kama muta is our name for the emotion that you probably call ‘being moved’,” says Schubert it’s a sudden intensification of what’s known as a communal sharing relationship – it’s that heartwarming rush of something that you feel when your newborn baby reaches out to you for the first time or you see a stranger’s joyful proposal across the room. he points out: “It could be WALL-E and Eve who are imaginary digital things,” he tells IFLScience they still wouldn't be – they’d just be machines.” and the love they have – you really do feel it That's why you buy tickets to Pixar movies – because you know they're going to evoke this emotion.” But just as “sad” can refer both to the emotion of getting a B in math when you were hoping for an A and also the overwhelming grief of losing a life partner in a sudden accident This is something you can feel towards a stranger who helps you find your way in a new city but it can also be the mania of a political rally or the ecstasy of a religious experience It “can be what we call love in a romantic way or even just a friendly way,” Fiske explains; “we've had students go to a Sufi mosque in each case kind of worried about whether they'd be welcome there when I'm worshiping in the mosque and when I'm watching a Pixar movie the emotion means different things in those different contexts – but at some deeper level We seek it out – we buy those movie tickets; we watch videos of kittens or soldiers coming home; hell we even set up elaborate bonding rituals in front of friends and family all just to prompt this feeling in ourselves and others. where I think people felt this sense of connection and unity But Hitler probably was evoking this when he was organizing the brownshirts and making people feel proud of Germany “There are so many institutions and practices whose function in some sense is to evoke this emotion,” Fiske tells IFLScience But the origins of kama muta may go way further back than that Fiske says: “I think this evolved over millions of years,” he tells IFLScience “out of something emotion-like that all female mammals have which is the feeling of love for their babies when their babies are born.” and the exhaustion that she feels having given birth,” he says he stresses – not every mother will immediately feel that starry-eyed love for the screaming red gremlin that just forced itself out of her body there would be no animals or birds,” Fiske says But scale that instinct up through a few million years’ worth of frontal lobe evolution and the result is kama muta – an ability to bond not just with those you share DNA with It can be what motivates people to fight for the conservation of nature or save abandoned animals; it can be what keeps you sober in rehab where I think people felt this sense of connection and unity,” Fiske tells IFLScience “But Hitler probably was evoking this when he was organizing the brownshirts and making people feel proud of Germany After spending millennia without even a name it’s perhaps a mark of impatience to demand immediate breakthroughs from kama muta an emotion that demands you to take your time with it “We spent a couple of years of work on just defining kama muta and understanding it,” Schubert tells IFLScience But as researchers’ familiarity with the emotion grows so too does their list of questions about it Can we use it for anything?” offers Schubert “Can you or do people use it spontaneously No doubt many of us – particularly those in advertising or politics – already feel familiar with some of those questions we’ve all seen that one commercial that makes us cry; the Pixar short that tugged at the heartstrings or the politician whose speeches stirred something inside us to action But that’s just the experience of kama muta – it’s not the process “I'm interested primarily in the psychology and the cultural aspects of this,” Fiske tells IFLScience “and you can go an awfully long way without knowing anything about the chemistry of it and without knowing what parts of the brain are active and so forth.” But “I would really like to know something about the chemistry of it,” he says [that] will help us understand the phylogenetic evolution.” I've done lots of research that I really enjoy but there's nothing more fun of all the things I've done,” Fiske tells IFLScience “I don’t know if it’s the most important – although I think it is quite important,” he says policy Trump Administration's Proposed Budget Slashes NASA, NOAA, Health Research15 hours ago650link to article VAULT society “The Hum” Has Hit The Hebrides – But It’s Not The First Unexplained Noise To Stump Scientists16 hours ago71link to article T. Rex Leather, Glow-In-The-Dark Gas Clouds, And Musical Sea Lions link to article The Five Most Common Headaches link to article © 2025 IFLScience. All Rights Reserved. RSS Fifth and final DLC pack also features new moves and MyFACTION content The Monday Night Wars were an unprecedented time in sports entertainment, pitting WWE against rival WCW in a weekly, head-to-head battle. Anything seemed possible, as the biggest, loudest and most outlandish Superstars created unforgettable moments each Monday night. Now, WWE® 2K24 players can relive those moments and create their own with the WCW Pack* Featuring some of the most iconic WCW stars - Diamond Dallas Page and Lex Luger - the final WWE 2K24 DLC pack sets the stage for players to rewrite history in the highest-rated WWE 2K franchise console game to-date.** The WCW Pack is available for individual purchase and Global Superstars Pack are also available for individual purchase now Diamond Dallas Page is a three-time World Heavyweight Champion and founder of the celebrated DDP Yoga program His signature Diamond Cutter finishing move and larger-than-life personality transcend sports entertainment Perhaps equally known for his time in WWE and WCW Perfect presented himself as the ultimate athlete capable of nailing impressive athletic feats on the first try and dazzling audiences with his incredible grappling technique and devastating Perfect Plex finishing move he held an undefeated streak for more than a year captured the Intercontinental Championship twice he held the United States Championship and World Tag Team Championship and was a key member of the nWo and West Texas Rednecks stables One of the first Japanese professional wrestlers to gain global appeal The Great Muta presented a frightening and charismatic persona spitting “green mist” into the eyes of opponents and revolutionizing an array of unique and lightning fast in-ring maneuvers such as the moonsault and shining wizard The Great Muta is a former WCW World Television Champion and battled the likes of Lex Luger and “Stunning” Steve Austin before he introduced his “Stone Cold” persona Known as “The Total Package” and “The Narcissist,” Lex Luger boasted one of the most impressive physiques in sports entertainment A former two-time World Heavyweight Champion Luger rose to fame in WCW with his devastating Torture Rack submission hold and feuds with the likes of Hulk Hogan He also made a name for himself in WWE by body slamming the massive Yokozuna on the deck of a US Navy aircraft carrier and incapacitating opponents by striking them with a metal plate embedded in his forearm Each playable character in the WCW Pack comes with their own MyFACTION card and they collectively bring over 55 new moves and taunts into the game which can also be used for custom Superstars in the creation suite Also included in the WCW Pack is the WCW Fall Brawl WarGames Arena a surprise new addition not previously advertised Also new to WWE 2K24’s MyFACTION game mode for all players is the nWo Wolfpac card series available November 15 and including Persona cards for Lex Luger Locker code “WARGAMES” will award a deluxe Singlet Supreme II pack WWE 2K24 Standard Edition will be on sale for 67% off and Forty Years of WrestleMania Edition will be on sale for 50% off On PlayStation platforms Standard Edition will be on sale for 67% off and Forty Years of WrestleMania Edition will be on sale for 50% off Standard Edition will be on sale for 67% off Deluxe Edition will be on sale for 60% off and Forty Years of WrestleMania Edition will be on sale for 50% off For more information on WWE 2K24, visit the game’s official website, become a fan on Facebook, follow the game on TikTok, X, and Instagram, and subscribe on YouTube Official campaign hashtags #WWE2K24 and #FinishYourStory 2K is a wholly-owned publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software 2K Account and Internet connection required to access DLC content Online play including MyFACTION requires 2K Account and Internet connection Console online play requires separate paid subscription **Based on average Metacritic ratings on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X as of November 5 Cookie Settings Powered by Onclusive PR Manager™ Bushmaster Firearms has just unveiled the next iteration of the Bushmaster MUTA Suppressor the new 3-D printed Inconel Bushmaster MUTA II Designed for use with .223 Rem./5.56 NATO cartridges the new Bushmaster MUTA II has a 14-percent sound reduction at the left ear a 15.4-percent reduction at the muzzle and a 15.9-percent reduction at the right ear The Bushmaster MUTA II 5.56 suppressor is designed with a compact length of 5.65 inches and only weighs 12.25 ounces The device’s front crap is also threaded and the baffle stack is removable for easy access to cleaning and maintenance The exterior of the MUTA II Suppressor is finished in a durable black Cerakote layer for protection against wear and hard use the primary material used for the construction of the Bushmaster MUTA II 5.56 mm suppressor is a nickel based “superalloy” with a high heat resistance and strength properties it’s also extremely resistant to corrosion and oxidation Outside of suppressor or firearms related applications Inconcel Alloy 625 is used in the marine and nuclear industries because of these qualities this material can withstand the harsh conditions present when containing the expanding gasses and the report of high pressure high velocity .223 Rem./5.56 NATO ammunition The 3-D printed configuration inside the Bushmaster MUTA II has a flow-through design which vents the gases forward in the same direction as the muzzle Bushmaster MUTA II Suppressor Specifications: To learn more about the new Bushmaster MUTA II Suppressor or other products from Bushmaster, visit bushmaster.com The armed citizen needs to know more than just defensive tactics and how to shoot Carry your pocket pistol on your waistband The new 8.6 BLK cartridge looks to be a step closer to the general-purpose role the .300 BLK was originally intended to fill Trust is expanding its gaming range with the release of the GXT1246 Muta Wireless Bluetooth Controller, designed specifically for Nintendo Switch users and turbo mode for a fully immersive gaming experience If you’re looking to enhance your gameplay the Muta controller is the perfect companion to take your Switch sessions to the next level One of the standout features of the Trust GXT1246 Muta is its wireless connectivity, allowing gamers to enjoy complete freedom of movement without the hassle of cords the Muta connects seamlessly via Bluetooth giving you full control over your gaming setup Whether you prefer playing docked on your TV or in tabletop mode ensuring that you always have the best possible gaming experience Running out of battery mid-game can be a serious buzzkill but the Muta controller has you covered with a rechargeable battery that provides up to 15 hours of playtime on a single charge You can continue gaming even while charging thanks to the included Play & Charge cable Whether you’re in the middle of an intense match or exploring an open-world adventure you never have to worry about your controller cutting out The Trust GXT1246 Muta doesn’t skimp on functionality including motion controls and vibration feedback It even comes with dedicated screenshot and turbo fire buttons letting you capture key moments or ramp up your in-game speed at the touch of a button the Muta delivers precision and customization to match your needs Input your search keywords and press Enter dynamic pieces are based on the Kutani-yaki style of ceramics We speak with Muta about her global popularity and how she creates art unburdened by convention Muta's captivating work is grounded in traditional Japanese ceramics but also features modern materials and techniques dynamic pieces have earned popularity and acclaim around the globe Muta has worked to leave her own creative mark We speak with her about her artistic process Part of my work is about moving the viewer People typically think of ceramics as these sedate objects But I want mine to feel like they're moving When I manage to create something like that This region is known for a traditional style of pottery called "Kutani-yaki." The knowledge and techniques have been passed down here for centuries Kutani-yaki is perhaps Japan's best-known colored porcelain Many of the techniques used are traditional but her style is distinctive and unburdened by convention I don't just use the traditional techniques - those are my foundation And I don't just use paints from Kutani-yaki or from Japan Muta does this again and again until she is satisfied The colors look completely different when you paint them You see it in your head and make test pieces But there are plenty of times when you take a piece out and go you're trying to craft in a way that produces beautiful colors One hallmark of Muta's pieces is their unique shapes She doesn't use an electric potter's wheel; There are effects you can't achieve with a wheel: but I don't want the surface to feel smooth she dreamed of being a painter when she grew up she finally earned a place in the painting course at her dream art school she felt unnerved by an assignment that involved sketching a nude woman but I had just been reading in a book about gender and art And this reading I was doing helped me make sense of why I felt so uncomfortable women's bodies were just casually used in this way And so to have nude women be an essential part of this first-year art class just did not feel right to me Muta dropped out of her art school and set her sights abroad She had long been interested in contemporary art But she began to have concerns about the materials she was using I was trying to give shape to my ideas as quickly as possible I wanted to use materials that could withstand use As Muta was pondering ways to use sustainable materials in her art a friend gifted her a souvenir: a Kutani-yaki teapot but this was the first time I really understood it The British people I knew saw Japan as having a lot of black and white That's the common image of Japan over there But Kutani-yaki felt so human in its design at the Ishikawa Prefecture Kutani-ware Technical Training Institute I realized Kutani-yaki pieces are paintings and people see paintings on ceramics as something completely different from paintings on a canvas Plus you can touch them and put food on them I thought if I could deconstruct and reconstruct this artform in my own unique way it would unlock the potential for so much interesting work Muta's motifs are the same ones that have long been found in Kutani-yaki: says her relationship with nature is intertwined with her beginnings as an artist my own little world felt so disconnected from the rest of the world I hadn't had much contact with the forests Muta often focuses on humanity's connection to nature - nature as it's depicted in classical art - or I'll do mythical creatures that are representations of nature filling in these gaps between the ancient world and the modern world Muta currently runs a studio with her husband They're raising their two children as Muta continues her career as an artist I use a lot of different materials and techniques And I can give my kids a great childhood here I feel very grateful for the environment we're in and I hope I can showcase the appeal of Kutani-yaki in my own way to show my gratitude This is a wellness center in Nomi created in collaboration with Kutani-yaki artisans It features rooms guests can spend the night in Muta worked on the interior design of one of the guest rooms I wanted to overlap the history of Kutani-yaki with the animals that live in Nomi today And I also included pieces of Kutani-yaki porcelain on the wall I was going for a feeling of plants blossoming Muta says she has experienced real nature for the first time in her life Tono Monogatari is a collection of folktales from Japan's northeastern Tohoku region Muta has loved the book since she was a girl after women would go through pregnancy and give birth they would often go mad and run off into the mountains I myself had recently become pregnant and given birth And I felt incredibly joyful about all that But perhaps it can bring with it a sort of feminine anguish the way they described those feelings was simply you're always just a few steps away from death But you have someone who wants to run away to the mountains I realized that I wanted to paint a scene like that Muta began including human figures in her work I have a piece called "In to the mountains," and it depicts a woman as she's fleeing up into the mountains It's an image of a modern woman because I'm the one painting it Muta's work - which challenges the boundaries between past and present and between traditional craft and high art - is attracting attention from beyond Japan's borders I expect I'll start taking more of my pieces overseas The size of a piece can change the way viewers feel about it so big it almost feels physically threatening and move in the direction that seems right to you Learn more about South Australia's new university for the future Scientists at the University of South Australia have come up with an innovative solution to improve the effectiveness of cannabidiol to treat epilepsy multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases Cannabidiol (CBD) is a non-psychoactive compound found in the cannabis plant anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties but its clinical applications to date have been limited by its poor water solubility and absorption in the human body By developing a phospholipid complex – a class of lipids (fats) that contain phosphorus – UniSA researchers have increased the solubility of cannabidiol by up to six times and improved its absorption in the gastrointestinal tract Lead researcher Professor Sanjay Garg says the breakthrough, reported in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences means that patients could experience more consistent and effective results with lower doses of oral CBD medications only a small fraction of orally ingested CBD reaches the bloodstream a number of different formulations have been explored and encapsulating CBD in gelatine matrix pellets but all of them have only resulted in minor improvements in bioavailability,” Prof Garg says His research team identified the optimal phospholipid composition to form nanosized CBD-PLC particles the phospholipid complex improved dissolution rates from 0% to 67.1% within three hours demonstrating a significant enhancement in drug release CBD-PLC exhibited 32.7% higher permeability than unmodified CBD ensuring greater absorption through the intestinal wall Another critical advantage of this new delivery system is its stability Traditional CBD formulations degrade over time when exposed to heat testing over 12 months showed that CBD-PLC retained its performance under varied storage conditions making it a more reliable option for pharmaceutical applications The study’s first author, UniSA PhD candidate Thabata Muta says the discovery has significant implications for the future of CBD-based therapeutics “Improved bioavailability means that lower doses can achieve the same therapeutic effect potentially reducing side effects and making treatment more cost effective,” Thabata says The research team believes that this innovation could be applied beyond CBD providing a blueprint for enhancing the absorption of other poorly water-soluble drugs With the global CBD market projected to grow from USD 7.59 billion in 2023 to USD 202.45 billion by 2032 the findings of this study come at a crucial time The team is now exploring opportunities for commercialisation and clinical trials to validate their new formulation “Optimising Cannabidiol Delivery: Improving Water Solubility and Permeability Through Phospholipid Complexation” is authored by Thabata Muta, Riya Khetan, Dr Yunmei Song and Professor Sanjay Garg from the University of South Australia. DOI: 10.3390/ijms26062647 The study was supported by a PhD scholarship jointly funded by the University of South Australia and the SA Government’s Industry Doctoral Training Centre program ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Media contact: Candy Gibson M: +61 434 605 142 E: candy.gibson@unisa.edu.auResearch contact: Professor Sanjay Garg E: sanjay.garg@unisa.edu.au A new financial plan to steady the ship for Australia’s naval fleet ‘Silver lining’ effect for many women who separate in midlife Before they vote: How schools shape young citizens 08 8302 2376 >Ask UniSA FAQs >Australian contact details +61 8 8302 0114 >Ask UniSA FAQs >International contact details 1300 301 703 >Ask UniSA FAQs >Campus Central contact details >Research degree student support >Key UniSA contacts >Staff Directory UniSA respectfully acknowledges the Kaurna Boandik and Barngarla First Nations Peoples and their Elders past and present who are the First Nations’ Traditional Owners of the lands that are now home to our campuses in Adelaide Discover the world's largest classical music catalogue with Presto Music If you are a library, university or other organisation that would be interested in an institutional subscription to Gramophone please click here for further information Register your team and participate live, or view the recording, of Doug Kennedy’s next 40-minute training webcast scheduled for Friday, June 21, from Noon – 12:45pm EST. REGISTER HERE While we in Western Cultures apparently don’t have a word for this feeling Kennedy explained that one can be found in the ancient Sanskrit language Everyone who registers receives a link to the recording The 40-minute format is perfect for lunch and learns or excerpts can be shared at staff meetings The target audience is anyone who is interested in upskilling themselves or others and the topic areas are broad enough to be relevant for all sectors of the lodging industry We are grateful to the generosity of our sponsors who have allowed us to offer complimentary admission and so we would normally charge at least $99 registration per person but this series is now completely free to all Sponsors include: Travel Outlook, the only KTN Certified call center, Better Talent, a subscription-based talent acquisition company serving the lodging sector, and Track Hospitality Software Complimentary registration can be accessed at www.KTNwebcast.com Here are the topics and dates for the additional topics scheduled so far REGISTER HERE As tech solutions continue to replace touch points in our guests’ cycle of service each remaining conversation becomes ever more important especially since guests are more likely to reach out to our humans either when things go wrong or when they have a special request or need and with an ever-increasing number using self-check-in any remaining interaction might be the only chance to put a face on your brand and foster loyalty REGISTER HERE Today’s hotel and event salespeople work in completely different environments than most of their leaders experienced Meeting planning and event booking sites have created a flood of leads which can be overwhelming for salespeople working within a sales role still designed for the era when most leads came in by phone or website inquiry forms salespeople are required to meet prospecting quotas there's no one at the receptionist station Self-serving thought leaders are pushing RFP automation and AI-powered prospecting real-world training habits and mind-shifting attitudes for booking more business REGISTER HERE Most marketing and distribution leaders tend to think the role of reservations agents is to field inbound calls Yet when you look at the phone logs at resorts and vacation rental companies many - and perhaps most - guests call multiple times prior to booking the more emotionally invested the guest is in their travel planning the more likely it is that several conversations will be required to get a caller across the finish line For additional details, contact KTN at [email protected] or by phone (01) 954.533.9130 www.kennedytrainingnetwork.com Doug Kennedy Kennedy Training Network (KTN) Posted in: 2K Games, Games, Video Games, WWE, WWE 2K | Tagged: wcw, WWE 2K24 as you're getting four legendary superstars from the past and from a rival company with the WCW Pack 2K Games has released the latest DLC pack for WWE 2K24 as they take a very brief tour of their rivals from the '90s with the WCW Pack but the names there put in are pretty significant as you're getting DDP Curt Hennig (although they're calling him Mr Perfect here when he never used that moniker in WCW) and probably the most significant of the bunch so you can fight across two rings in a cage Among the most beloved WCW stars, Diamond Dallas Page is a three-time World Heavyweight Champion and founder of the celebrated DDP Yoga program Perhaps equally known for his time in WWE and WCW, Mr Perfect presented himself as the ultimate athlete One of the first Japanese professional wrestlers to gain global appeal, The Great Muta presented a frightening and charismatic persona spitting "green mist" into the eyes of opponents and "Stunning" Steve Austin before he introduced his "Stone Cold" persona Known as "The Total Package" and "The Narcissist," Lex Luger boasted one of the most impressive physiques in sports entertainment He also made a name for himself in WWE by body-slamming the massive Yokozuna on the deck of a US Navy aircraft carrier and incapacitating opponents by striking them with a metal plate embedded in his forearm Cannabiz University of South Australia scientists have developed a new solution to improve the effectiveness of cannabidiol (CBD) in treating epilepsy CBD’s clinical applications have been limited by its poor water solubility and absorption in the human body By developing a phospholipid complex – a class of lipids (fats) that contain phosphorus – researchers at the university have increased the solubility of CBD by up to six times and improved its absorption in the gastrointestinal tract Lead researcher Professor Sanjay Garg said the breakthrough, reported in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences means patients could experience more consistent and effective results with lower doses of oral CBD medications but all of them have only resulted in minor improvements in bioavailability,” he added The research team identified the optimal phospholipid composition to form nanosized CBD-PLC particles The team also found the new delivery system to be more stable than traditional CBD formulations which degrade over time when exposed to heat Testing over 12 months showed CBD-PLC retained its performance under varied storage conditions said the discovery has significant implications for the future of CBD-based therapeutics “Improved bioavailability means lower doses can achieve the same therapeutic effect potentially reducing side effects and making treatment more cost effective,” she said The research team believes the innovation could be applied beyond CBD It is now exploring opportunities for commercialisation and clinical trials to validate the new formulation and the SA Government’s Industry Doctoral Training Centre program You must be logged in to post a comment. Volume 11 - 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01240 People often view out-groups as less human than their in-group Some media video content is heart-warming and leaves one feeling touched or moved Recent research indicates that this reflects a positive social emotion which is evoked by a sudden increase in interpersonal closeness specifically by the relational model of communal sharing and communal bonds exemplifies valued human qualities and because other humans are our primary target partners of communal sharing we predicted that feeling kama muta in response to observing communal sharing among out-group strangers would make people view out-groups as more human we replicated a model obtained through a large exploratory preliminary study which indicated that videos depicting out-group members enacting communal sharing evoked kama muta and increased protagonist humanization led to decreased blatant dehumanization of the entire out-group via perceived out-group warmth and motivation to develop a communal sharing relationship with the protagonist The preregistered Study 2 further tested our model demonstrating (1) that the relationship between protagonist humanization and kama muta is bidirectional such that baseline humanization of the protagonist also increases feelings of kama muta in response to acts of communal sharing; (2) that watching videos of communal sharing increased protagonist humanization; and (3) that kama muta videos had an indirect effect on the reduction of out-group blatant dehumanization which was mediated by protagonist humanization and out-group warmth Isak and Even just have their eyes on each other I have learnt so much from season 3 – that we just have to accept who we are The fact that we are first and foremost human – and not our sexuality Anonymous comment from the official SKAM web page at the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) The comment above illustrates the emotional responses to the video clips which evidently convey positive feelings about gay men We posit that this reduction in negative perceptions is due to a specific emotional response that opens people to new social connections an emotion which people often label as feeling moved research on the link between positive emotions and the perception of out-groups as more human is scarce The aim of the current paper is to close this gap by investigating the effect of an emotion which motivates social connections We therefore test whether the exposure to videos with such a theme leads to perceiving the protagonists and their groups as more human by evoking kama muta We start by outlining research on kama muta and explain how the relation between kama muta and humanization is plausible we delineate research on dehumanization and present findings showing that humanization is not necessarily the opposite of dehumanization we explicate the model in detail and summarize a preliminary study before presenting two preregistered studies which test our model we postulate that feeling kama muta from viewing out-group members portraying acts of communal sharing is a form of parasocial contact which we predict will increase the perceived humanness of the protagonists and their groups kama muta is a cross-culturally validated emotion which is evoked by a sudden intensification of a communal sharing relation we specifically test the effect of kama muta evoked through parasocial contact on perceived humanness We suggest that kama muta will increase perceived humanness because it signals a propitious opportunity for a new or renewed communal sharing relationship with a trustworthy dehumanizing is excluding from a community because of a presumed breech of minimal goals whereas humanizing is perceiving the other as approximating an ideal such as going out of one’s way to help someone The extent of dehumanization describes the degree of negative deviation and the extent of humanization describes how ideal the person or behavior is explains why humanization has no clearly defined endpoint and is more than the absence of dehumanization disgust is an important emotional elicitor of dehumanization there is no research on the potential effect of positive emotions on viewing out-groups as human We suggest that kama muta is a positive emotion with consequences for humanization since it informs people of the opportunity to develop new communal relationships with trustworthy We therefore expect a strong correlation between kama muta and individual humanization of out-group members We expect this association to reflect both causal directions such that (1) kama muta increases humanization of other individuals and (2) humanization of other individuals increases the level of experienced kama muta We expect kama muta to increase humanization of out-group members because kama muta is evoked by intense CS which portrays actions that are considered to be human which we believe is an important prerequisite for responding emotionally to the out-group member’s actions is also expected to influence the evocation of kama muta we expect that an important prerequisite of feeling kama muta from out-group members’ actions is to see them as people that are able to act in ideal human ways We will first test for the correlation between kama muta and humanization in the first study and follow up by testing the bi-directionality in the second study these chains of mediation imply that the direct effects of kama muta on consequences further downstream are necessarily smaller than those on more proximate consequences as each link in the chain is only partially influenced by the previous link and partially by extraneous factors the inference from a person to her group is influenced by group salience which we increased through our experimental procedures but also by perceived prototypicality of the person we replicated the model derived in the preliminary study using confirmatory analyses on a new sample we further tested two aspects of the replicated model: 1. We controlled for possibility that the effects of kama muta might simply be accounted for by general positive valence by adding amusement as a comparison condition. Whereas kama muta is associated with the positive experience of fostering close, communal sharing relationships, which should lead to viewing out-groups as more human, amusement leads to a positive, hedonic experience which distracts the viewer from negative thoughts (Oliver and Bartsch, 2010) communal aspect that feeling kama muta signifies is what increases the humanization of individual targets (as we predict) then this effect should be unique to the kama muta videos it is simply general positive emotional valence which increases humanization of the involved parties then this effect should be solicited by both kama muta and amusing videos 2. All data and codes are uploaded on OSF: https://osf.io/fmj97/ We report how we determined our sample size All studies were approved by the internal review board at the Department of Psychology Informed consent was obtained from all participants We tested the causal directions underlying the previously documented correlation between feeling kama muta and humanizing the protagonist in the video which solicited kama muta; is the protagonist seen as human which then enables the viewer to feel kama muta or does feeling kama muta enable the viewer to humanize the out-group protagonist We will assess the replication of the model in Study 1 through model fit indices We recruited N = 440 participants from Prolific Academic requesting White heterosexual US American nationals with an approval rate of 90% The inclusion of only White heterosexual US Americans was in order to ensure that the videos participants saw depicted either ethnic or sexual out-groups some participants categorized themselves as non-heterosexual when responding to demographic questions Participants were compensated with 1 GBP for their time participants were excluded from the primary analyses if they did not watch the whole video (N = 42) did not watch the video with sound or watched the video with someone (N = 24) or were of the same group membership as the protagonist in the video (N = 1) We also excluded one participant who was under the age of 18 33 categorized themselves as non-heterosexual and all participants categorized themselves as White Americans Descriptive statistics and example items for measures used in Study 1 Participants were asked to indicate their agreement to the following measures using a 7-point scale ranging from 0 – Not at all to 6 – A lot with the exception of the feeling thermometer scales which ranged from 0 – Cold to 100 – Warm We included the physiological signs and appraisal subscales even though the preliminary study showed that kama muta labels is the best predictor in order to assess that participants felt kama muta A measure of individual-level humanization was developed for the present study as previous research has focused on dehumanization measures This face-valid measure of protagonist humanization asked participants to indicate how human they considered the protagonist to be (three items “[the protagonist] seemed very human,” “[the protagonist]’s actions demonstrate how human the [the protagonist] is,” and “[the protagonist] shows what being human truly is”) These items were directed to the protagonist which participants focused on when watching the video “the father”) was replaced with the protagonist in the items above In order to assess feelings of warmth toward the in-group and out-group, we asked participants to indicate how cold or warm they felt toward US Americans (the in-group), Black people, Pakistanis, Indians, gay men, and Thai people (from Haddock et al., 1993) we assessed feelings of warmth toward all groups and not only toward the out-group which was depicted in the video Blatant dehumanization is the process of explicitly excluding someone from the human category by using characteristics that are explicitly related to non-human entities when describing them Ratings of these characteristics correlate moderately with strongly with alignment of out-groups with the “ascent” image of man from quadrupedal human ancestor to modern-day human indicating that these characteristics underlie blatant dehumanization The descriptive statistics presented in Table 1 show that the videos elicited kama muta in the perceiver as seen in the above mid-point ratings of kama muta appraisals (M = 4.02) and labels (M = 4.42) The below mid-point ratings of kama muta physiological signs (M = 2.64) indicate that the kama muta experience was not very strong Protagonist humanization scores were far above the mid-point (M = 5.17) and the blatant group dehumanization scores were below the mid-point (M = 2.49) indicating the protagonists and their groups were seen as human A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) using SPSS 26 was conducted to test for differences between the groups portrayed in the videos feeling thermometer score toward the out-group portrayed in the video and blatant group dehumanization were added as dependent variables The group portrayed in the video was added as a fixed factor Both Indians and Pakistanis were portrayed in the same video so the measure asking participants which protagonist they focused on was used to determine whether they were presented with blatant group dehumanization measures about Pakistanis or Indians there was a significant difference between the groups portrayed in the video F(28 Looking at pairwise comparisons (with Bonferroni correction) videos depicting gay men had significantly lower ratings of kama muta labels (M = 3.48 3.96]) than videos depicting Black people (M = 4.38 Kama muta physiological signs were also significantly lower among participants who saw a video depicting gay men (M = 2.09 2.59]) compared to videos depicting Indians (M = 3.10 4.95]) were humanized less than Black (M = 5.19 Participants who saw a video with Thai protagonists were more motivated to develop a CS relationship with the protagonist (M = 4.67 4.88]) compared to participants who saw videos depicting gay men (M = 3.57 Indians received significantly lower blatant group dehumanization scores (M = 1.91 2.23]) than all of the other groups: Black people (M = 2.64 In contrast to the model in the preliminary study all parameters of the retained model were significant Latent factor model from Study 1 with standardized estimates the indirect effect through feeling thermometer was significantly larger than the indirect effect through CS motivation B = -0.112 [-0.209 The indirect effects from kama muta feelings were not significantly different B = -0.026 [-0.102 The aim of Study 1 was to investigate if the model retained in the preliminary exploratory study would be replicated We therefore preregistered the model and collected data on a new sample Our findings show that the model in the preliminary study was replicated in Study 1 as indicated by the model fit indices results show that after watching a video that evokes kama muta by depicting communal sharing between out-group members people view the out-group protagonists as more human Viewing the individual out-group protagonists as human generalized to ascribing fewer dehumanizing characteristics to their whole group This effect on blatant out-group dehumanization was mediated by motivation to develop a CS relationship with the protagonist and by having warmer feelings toward the protagonist’s group The model also shows that kama muta labels also had an indirect effect on blatant group dehumanization through the mediators out-group feeling thermometer and motivation for CS there was a strong overlap between kama muta labels and protagonist humanization as seen in the high correlation between these two constructs (r = 0.61) We decided to model these as independent variables rather than assuming any directionality by having one predict the other making it difficult to assess directionality and that a bidirectional effect of kama muta on protagonist humanization is plausible kama muta can have an effect on protagonist humanization because of the emotion-eliciting event portraying out-groups acting in human ways as not being capable of acting in human ways might hinder one from feeling kama muta in response to their actions in Study 2 we will investigate the directionality between kama muta and protagonist humanization The comparison of groups depicted in the videos showed that gay men generally evoked less kama muta and were humanized less than the other groups participants’ attitudes toward Thai people and Indians were more positive compared to Black people and gay men due to the room for improvement of people’s attitudes toward Black people and gay men we decided to focus on these out-groups in Study 2 This makes amusement and kama muta frequent emotional responses to media video content featuring out-group members making the understanding of the effects of such emotional responses important for predicting societal processes As the model retained in the preliminary study was replicated with confirmatory analyses in Study 1 our aim in this final study is to test two aspects of our model (1) We test if the effects of kama muta obtained in the preliminary study and Study 1 are due to the specific emotional state of kama muta or whether they can be more generally attributed to its positivity by adding amusement as a comparison condition (2) Whereas in the preliminary study and in Study 1 we tested for a relation between feelings of kama muta elicited by the video and protagonist humanization we now aimed to investigate the causal direction of this relationship In order to test the directionality of kama muta and protagonist humanization a pre–post study design with a week delay was employed participants saw a short segment of a video which was presented in full at the second time point a week later (i.e. participants were asked to respond to the protagonist humanization scale after seeing the video Only a part of the video was presented at Time 1 because we were interested in how human the protagonist was seen before the protagonist acted in ways that would either evoke kama muta or amusement kama muta and amusement was only measured at Time 2 This design allowed us to test if protagonist humanization measured at Time 1 predicted kama muta scores at Time 2 if protagonist humanization predicts kama muta by taking the difference score of protagonist humanization between Time 1 and Time 2 and using kama muta scores to predict this difference we were able to test if kama muta increases protagonist humanization as blatant group dehumanization was also measured at both Time 1 and Time 2 we were able to test for the directionality of the link between kama muta and blatant group dehumanization Thus, the preregistered hypotheses (see https://aspredicted.org/3wc25.pdf for the pre-registration) are as follows: (H1) Moving videos 3 will increase protagonist humanization from Time 1 to Time 2 whereas there will be no increase for funny videos (H2) Protagonist humanization at Time 1 positively predicts kama muta ratings at Time 2 (H3) The retained model from the preliminary study and Study 1 will be conceptually replicated with data from Time 2 comparing moving with funny videos (H4) Moving videos will decrease blatant group dehumanization, from Time 1 to Time 2, whereas there will be no decrease for funny videos 4 (H5) Blatant group dehumanization at Time 1 negatively predicts kama muta ratings at Time 2 We recruited N = 350 participants at Time 1 from Academic Prolific requesting White heterosexual US nationals with an approval rate of 90% Participants were compensated with 1 GBP for their time at Time 1 and were promised an additional 3 GBP after they had completed the study at Time 2 participants were excluded from the primary analyses if they did not complete the second part of the study (N = 124); if they were not alone when watching the video (N = 9); if they were frequently distracted during the survey (N = 2); or if they were of the same group membership as the protagonist in the video (N = 8) we excluded one participant because he had prior knowledge about the protagonist in the video and one participant because he had technical problems all categorized themselves as White/Caucasian and heterosexual A within- and between-subject design over two time points was employed (see Figure 2) Video content was a within-subject factor where participants saw both a funny and a moving video The between-subject factors were the group membership of the protagonists in the moving and funny videos (i.e. Black American or gay men) and the order in which the videos were presented all participants saw both a moving video and a funny video and were presented with both gay male and Black American protagonists but some participants saw a funny video with a Black American protagonist whereas other participants saw a funny video with a gay male protagonist There were four sets of videos and participants were only presented with a video from two of the four stimulus sets These four stimulus sets contained three videos each and portrayed either (1) Black American protagonists evoking kama muta (2) Black American protagonists evoking amusement (3) gay male protagonists evoking kama muta or (4) gay male protagonists evoking amusement if a participant was presented with a funny video with gay male protagonists then the second video would be a moving video with a Black American protagonist The order of all four types of videos was randomized Pictorial representation of the pre and post-test experimental design in Study 2 participants saw a 10-s segment of the video selected to not induce kama muta or amusement in order to give them a frame of reference when responding to the protagonist humanization measure The videos were presented in the same order at both time points The group membership of the protagonists was indicated before each video (e.g. “You will now see a video of a Black American father”); this was in order to ensure that participants were aware of the group membership of the protagonists before each video they watched in order to ensure that responses were based on the video clips alone and not prior contact or knowledge of the protagonists in the video clips we asked participants beforehand whether they had heard about the TV series or musician presented in the videos Protagonist humanization, blatant group humanization, feeling thermometer, and motivation for CS measures were the same as in Study 1 5 The group level measures addressed both Black Americans and gay men The kama muta measure was slightly modified from Study 1: the physiological sign items from Study 1 were split up to measure one physiological sign at a time (i.e. “moist eyes,” “cried,” “chills,” “goosebumps,” “warm feeling in the chest”) The labels and appraisal components of kama muta were the same as in Study 1 We made composite scores of each kama muta component in addition to a composite score comprising kama muta labels and physiological signs This is because we wished to include a variable which reflects the feeling and the intensity of kama muta experienced by participants Amusement was assessed using one item “I was amused”; we also assessed physiological signs (“I laughed”) and appraisal (“I observed something comical”) Only protagonist humanization and blatant group dehumanization measures were presented at Time 1, whereas at Time 2 all measures were presented (see Figure 2). See Table 2 for descriptive statistics of the measures Descriptive statistics for measures used in Study 2 We tested the hypotheses that kama muta would increase protagonist humanization from Time 1 to Time 2 (H1) and that protagonist humanization at Time 1 would increase evoked kama muta at Time 2 (H2) by fitting mixed models using SPSS 24 and their interactions as factors and removed the non-significant factors and interactions from the retained models Exploratorily, we conducted mediation analyses to investigate if it was in fact the elicited emotions that mediated the effect of change in protagonist humanization from Time 1 to Time 2. We tested for mediation using the classical 3-step approach, but fitting mixed models and calculating CIs of the indirect paths using a Monte Carlo procedure (Falk and Biesanz, 2016) non-significant (as seen in the overlapping CIs) increase in protagonist humanization for the funny videos when participants had high scores on amusement (+1 SD) participants saw the protagonists as less human compared to Time 1 after watching a funny video of them Mediation analyses in Study 2 showing standardized estimates (z-values) The coding of video content is reversed in the amusement mediation analyses for ease of interpretation Ratings of protagonist humanization in Study 2 while controlling for kama muta and amusement kama muta (labels and physiological signs) was added as the dependent variable protagonist humanization at Time 1 was added as a fixed covariate and video content was added as a fixed factor Intercepts were allowed to vary across participants the main effect of protagonist humanization at Time 1 was significant the video content∗protagonist humanization at Time 1 interaction was also significant The simple slopes show that the more the protagonist was seen as human before the moving video the more kama muta participants felt after the moving video given that the funny videos were not expected to evoke any kama muta but we had forgotten to preregister that interaction we specified the same model as for H2 but used amusement as the dependent variable the main effect of protagonist humanization at Time 1 was significant F(1 So was the video content∗protagonist humanization at Time 1 interaction Simple slopes show that the more the protagonist was seen as human before the amusing event the more amused participants felt after the funny video Next, we tested the hypothesis that the retained model from the preliminary study and Study 1 would be conceptually replicated with data from Time 2, comparing moving with funny videos (H3). To do so, we specified a two-condition within-participant path model as suggested by Montoya and Hayes (2017) This procedure includes making a difference score between the two conditions for the mediators and outcome variables in the model (i.e. We made difference scores by subtracting scores for the funny video from the scores for the moving video allowing us to investigate the effects of the moving videos relative to the funny videos A within-participant serial mediation model from Study 2 The direct effect of video content on blatant group humanization (c’) was not significant whereas a total effect (c) was significant The model was identified and indicated good model fit, χ2(10) = 8.70, p = 0.561, RMSEA (90% CI) = 0.00 (0.00, 0.066), CFI = 1.00, SRMR = 0.029. The standardized parameter estimates are shown in Figure 4 Our model shows that the moving video predicted more protagonist humanization and that this difference in protagonist humanization predicted more motivation to develop a CS relationship with the protagonist and warmer feelings toward the protagonist’s group While controlling for motivation to develop a CS relationship with the protagonist warmer feelings toward the group after watching the moving video predicted less blatant dehumanization of the group We examined the indirect effect of video content on blatant group dehumanization through protagonist humanization employing a bootstrap analysis with 10,000 resamples and percentile confidence intervals This analysis showed a serial mediation from video content to protagonist humanization to warmer feelings of the protagonist’s group to less blatant dehumanization of the said group The indirect effect through warmer feelings toward the group was significantly larger than the indirect effect through motivation for CS The indirect effect through motivation for CS was not significant We also examined a mediation from video content through protagonist humanization to motivation to develop a CS relationship employing the same bootstrap analysis which showed that this indirect effect was significant we tested the hypotheses that participants exposed to a moving video would show a decrease in blatant group dehumanization (H4) and that blatant group dehumanization at Time 1 would predict kama muta at Time 2 (H5) We followed the same steps as for H1 and H2 blatant group dehumanization was the dependent variable video content and order and the interaction video content∗order were fixed factors as these were the only significant factors that were retained from the initial model There was a significant main effect of order F(1,661) = 7.81 There was a significant video content∗order interaction F(1,219) = 3.87 the group depicted in the moving video was blatantly dehumanized more (M = 1.72) compared to the group that was presented in the funny video that was presented first (M = 1.41) The blatant dehumanization score for the group depicted in the moving video that was presented second was lower (M = 1.58) than for the group that was depicted in the funny video that was presented second (M = 1.79) Ratings of blatant group dehumanization in Study 2 while controlling for protagonist humanization blatant group dehumanization at Time 1 was added as a fixed covariate The main effect of blatant group dehumanization at Time 1 was significant and so was the main effect of video content F(1 the video content∗blatant group dehumanization at Time 1 interaction was significant our hypothesis was supported such that the lesser the group was seen as human at Time 1 the lesser participants felt kama muta after the moving video the parameter for the funny video was not significant meaning that blatant group dehumanization did not have an effect on kama muta ratings after the funny video The model retained in Study 1 was conceptually replicated in Study 2 in a model where we also compared the effects of moving videos to those of funny videos: Compared to funny videos moving videos depicting a communal sharing interaction increased protagonist humanization This difference in protagonist humanization reduced blatant group dehumanization and this effect was mediated through feeling thermometer scores when people see a moving video of specific out-group members acting communally This influences how the entire group of the protagonist is seen; from seeing the group as warm We additionally found that prior humanness perceptions of the protagonist and group also affected how much kama muta participants experienced; that is not only does feeling kama muta make people see others as more human the more likely they are to be moved by their communal interactions in the first place In contrast to the positive effect of kama muta on humanization of individual out-group members causal effect of video content on blatant dehumanization of the entire out-group in response to observations of how its members interact appears to hinge upon the evaluation of its specific there was a significant difference in protagonist humanization between the moving video and the funny video at Time 1 some kama muta and amusement could have been elicited during these 10-s video clips as there was an increase in protagonist humanization from Time 1 to Time 2 in the kama muta condition this does not invalidate the conclusion that watching a moving video leads to increased protagonist humanization we found an order effect of the videos in the blatant group dehumanization responses where the funny video that was presented first had lower blatant dehumanization ratings than the moving video that was presented first This could be due to our design choice to measure blatant group dehumanization of both groups after participants had seen both moving and funny videos therefore influencing the blatant group dehumanization scores The order effect indicates that the funny video attenuated the effect of the moving video on blatant dehumanization whereas the moving video could have contaminated the blatant dehumanization ratings of the group presented in the funny video even though our design choice produced an unfortunate order effect we do not see this as invalidating our results as the order effects made the group depicted in the moving video more blatantly dehumanized thus going against our hypothesis and the general pattern of effects that we found future replication work might use a between-subject design to avoid any such order effects In this paper, we have presented novel findings on how a positive emotion, kama muta, increases out-group humanization. Previous research has focused on how negative emotions have increased dehumanization (e.g., Dalsklev and Kunst, 2015), whereas this paper presents a possible way to ameliorate dehumanization, which has been shown to have many negative consequences (e.g., Kteily et al., 2015) The aims of this paper were to investigate the effect of the emotion of kama muta evoked by observing communal interactions between out-group members on viewing them as more human and to investigate which variables mediate the effect of this emotion on the reduction of blatant out-group dehumanization we found that kama muta increases humanness perceptions at both the individual and group levels and that reduction of group-level dehumanization is mediated by feelings of warmth toward the out-group and humanization of the protagonists depicted in the communal interactions we can conclude that we were successful in evoking kama muta in our participants our studies also showed that kama muta and protagonist humanization are closely related Study 1 found a high correlation between the variables so we modeled both as independent variables in our model not making assumptions regarding how kama muta and protagonist humanization are related in Study 2 we investigated the effect of kama muta on protagonist humanization by measuring protagonist humanization before and after videos evoking kama muta and amusement we found that protagonist humanization increased after watching a kama muta-evoking video depicting out-group protagonists This effect was stronger than what feeling amusement had on protagonist humanization How much the viewer perceived the protagonists as human before watching an emotional video also predicted the level of kama muta and amusement in the viewer after watching the video Viewing the protagonist as human enables people to react emotionally to the video our results do not show whether this prior humanization is due to having more favorable views of the out-groups in the video or if this is an indication of participant’s ability to be transported in the narrative and identify with the protagonists they are seen as potential CS relational partners we also found that humanization of individual targets generalize to reduce dehumanization of their whole group in a model developed through stringent exploratory data analysis in our preliminary study and replicated twice in studies 1 and 2 Kama muta reduces blatant out-group dehumanization through the mediating psychological processes of warm feelings toward the group and motivation to develop a communal sharing relationship with the protagonist The warmth mediator was the most consistent mediator across the studies viewing the protagonist as human was also an important mediator in the serial mediation model in Study 2 future studies should test for humanization of out-groups not presented in the kama muta evoking videos it is noteworthy that warm feelings were so closely related to blatant out-group dehumanization in the current studies which is more easily explained by our kama muta framework it was difficult to empirically compare kama muta with moral elevation in Study 2 once an authoritative measure of moral elevation will be available it will be possible in future work to compare the effect of kama muta to that of moral elevation on increasing out-group humanization we presented the protagonist humanization and blatant group dehumanization measures in our studies in a fixed order which prevents us from controlling for order effects pertaining to these measures our results suggest that seeing media video content depicting communal interactions between out-group members and feeling kama muta as a response to it will most likely have an effect on viewing these groups as more human This is precisely what the Norwegian TV series SKAM did for the viewers cited in the beginning of this paper The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at: 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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited in accordance with accepted academic practice distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms *Correspondence: Johanna K. Blomster Lyshol, am9oYW5uYS5rYXRhcmluYS5ibG9tc3RlckBnbWFpbC5jb20= Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. 94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or goodLearn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish. We still have more great pro wrestling than we know what to do with So The Ringer brings you a regular cheat sheet with the three best matches of the past week—one from WWE and one from the rest of the immense wrestling world I braved a snowstorm in the Denver area on Wednesday night to attend Dynamite and Rampage live. It was a great overall card—highlights include a fun Bryan Danielson vs. Ethan Page match (the first time I saw Danielson wrestle live since his Munenori Sawa bout in New Jersey for Evolve back in September 2010) the standout was the sixth match of AEW’s best-of-seven series between Death Triangle and the Elite I think this kind of chaotic spotfest brawl works really well as a live experience There are constant explosions going on all over the arena and you really feel like you are in the middle of a riot I wasn’t particularly excited when they announced this specific best-of-seven series; I have been a low voter on most of their previous interactions and Pac than most wrestling fans—all love to Fénix They have done a nice job of making sure these matches feel different than their previous encounters with folks shifting up their styles a bit and mixing in gimmicks while selling long-term injuries This match was “falls count anywhere” and really delivered on the pandemonium that stipulation promises The wrestlers actually started the match in the back brawling amongst the catering with a couple of big backstage spots including Pac hitting a moonsault off of some risers Fénix getting backdropped through a table and some deli trays (sending the hotel-catering-style cookie array flying) and Nick Jackson landing a flip dive that sent Penta through the chip table I saw two types of Doritos—regular and Cool Ranch—some regular Lays all with black tape over the labels (for licensing reasons It feels like AEW should have healthier catering; these guys are top-level athletes I loved how they shifted the match out of the back perched above the stage like the Phantom of the Opera Omega came sprinting from the back right with a V-Trigger that sent Fénix ass over teakettle Nick Jackson then sent Pac downhill on the ramp with a series of rolling Northern Lights suplexes including a final double Northern Lights suplex on both Pac and Fénix The in-ring portion of the match never slowed down with wrestlers flying in and out of the ring at breakneck speed putting it on his head and drilling it with a V-Trigger and then flattening the can (and smashing Pac’s kidneys) with a Liger Bomb One highlight sequence saw him get flipped into a hurricanrana on one Buck somersault into a cutter on the other Buck and then wipe out Omega and Michael Nakazawa with a tope con hilo The finish was pretty great: Pac and Penta were squared off with the Bucks and ripping through one of their high-octane I started to notice that Omega and Fénix were brawling over near the side of the stage Pac had Matt Jackson locked in the Brutalizer and then suddenly the attention of the crowd shifted to Omega planting Fénix with a One-Winged Angel off of the stage through tables for the win I loved how the finish snapped the crowd’s attention to an entirely different part of the arena and how they timed the pin moments before Jackson was about to give up the ghost and I am sure he has lots of disturbing ideas saved up and ready to unleash A retired wrestler coming to town and walking tall through a rampaging heel team is a classic wrestling trope When “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan needed help with Skandor Akbar’s army he called up “Cowboy” Bill Watts to throw some soup bones When the Fabulous Ones were getting brutalized by the Moondogs their mentor “Fabulous” Jackie Fargo strapped on the bowtie The Freebirds could run wild over the Von Erich brothers but would be in big trouble if papa Fritz Von Erich came calling When someone needed to shut Roddy Piper’s big mouth Bruno Sammartino put down his microphone and put on a pair of high-waisted wrestling trunks These types of matches are usually very simple and very crowd-pleasing: the heels almost always will get a long advantage on the active wrestler who called in the favor delaying the entrance of the icon until the very end John Cena returning to SmackDown for the last show of the year hewed closely to that classic layout (It’s called a classic layout for a reason.) The match opened with Zayn and Owens going at each other with Owens gaining the early advantage and even blooding Zayn’s nose a bit with a hard right hand Reigns then tagged in and dropped Owens with a clothesline Owens had his eyebrow split and was bleeding from the eye as Zayn and Owens worked him over Reigns pulled Cena off the apron and ran him into the barricade This led to Owens fighting both Bloodline members by himself even landing a frog splash on Reigns for a near-fall Reigns then blocked a pop-up powerbomb with a Superman punch but missed a follow-up spear and smashed his shoulder into the turnbuckle That allowed Owens to finally tag Cena and the conquering hero ran wild dropping both Reigns and Zayn with back suplexes and setting up a double Five Knuckle Shuffle with Owens dropping Reigns with the Attitude Adjustment leaving Owens to stunner Zayn and get the pin The match felt a bit truncated, and I would have liked them to find a way to show the whole thing rather than have a bunch of the heat on Owens happen during the commercial break. However this kind of purely crowd-pleasing wrestling is really fun to watch, and Cena clearly still has a tremendous connection to the fans. I imagine if Cena ends up at WrestleMania Vikingo defended his AAA Mega Championship against Bandido in a match that had the GIF makers racing to capture the daring spots they pulled off the New Year is about fireworks and spectacle NOAH headlined its Budokan show on January 1 with one of the last matches in the legendary career of the Great Muta as he took on visiting WWE star (and former IWGP Heavyweight champion) Shinsuke Nakamura Nakamura was returning to Japanese wrestling for the first time since he signed with WWE in 2017 (outside of some WWE house shows) and was clearly eager to put on a show against one of his idols Presentation is a big part of a match like this, and both guys had really great-looking entrances and outfits. Nakamura brought over Lee England Jr. to play the violin as he came to the ring, and he was decked out in a black-and-red bodysuit (think a wrestling version of Eddie Murphy’s Delirious outfit) Muta had on an elaborate robe and a leather mask that resembled his iconic face paint and walked slowly to the ring to ominous music Muta is well known for his methodical wrestling style While he obviously hasn’t sped up his style in his 60s he is really great at making the things he does mean a ton There were a lot of breaks in the action when both guys made weird faces at each other—luckily these are a pair of guys who are great at making weird faces Nakamura then took over with his signature offense including ax kicks and a sliding German suplex which was a pretty harsh bump for an old man to take Muta then cut off a running attack from Nakamura with a spray of red mist. Muta went to work with a chair, but Nakamura was able to clear his eyes and take over with punches and kicks. Nakamura sprinted down the entrance ramp to hit a clothesline and then locked in his flying juji gatame, only for Muta to break the hold by spraying his even deadlier black mist in Shinsuke’s eyes That allowed Muta to drill the Shining Wizard for a close near-fall He landed one to the back of Nakamura’s head but a third attempt got cut off with a Kinshasa jumping knee Then, in one of the coolest and most creative finishes in years, Nakamura gave Muta the Corleone kiss of death Nakamura then spit the original iconic green mist into Muta’s face blinding him and leaving him open to be drilled by the Kinshasa Muta matches are really more about memorable individual moments than hard-hitting workrate and the Nakamura kiss is one of those moments which will be remembered for a long time Nakamura hasn’t been used on WWE TV since losing in the first round of the SmackDown World Cup in November It would be cool if they referenced this Muta match as a way to repackage him You could have Nakamura stealing the mist be permanent and have him blinding people as a heel move With the rumblings of an Asuka repackaging having them together as a couple of mist-spraying chaos demons would be pretty great Nakamura is too good to flounder and he showed here that when given the opportunity Phil Schneider is a cofounder of the Death Valley Driver Video Review, a writer on the Segunda Caida blog, host of The Way of the Blade podcast, and the author of Way of the Blade: 100 of the Greatest Bloody Matches in Wrestling History, which is available on Amazon. He is on Twitter at @philaschneider. ArchiveWe’ve been around since Brady was a QB Volume 6 - 2015 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2015.00364 Compared to our understanding of the taxonomic composition of the symbiotic microbes in marine sponges the functional diversity of these symbionts is largely unknown and proteomic techniques to functional questions on sponge host-symbiont interactions is in its infancy we generated a transcriptome for the host and a metatranscriptome of its microbial symbionts for the giant barrel sponge In combination with a gene-specific approach our goals were to (1) characterize genetic evidence for nitrogen cycling in X an important limiting nutrient on coral reefs (2) identify which prokaryotic symbiont lineages are metabolically active and (3) characterize the metabolic potential of the prokaryotic community Xestospongia muta expresses genes from multiple nitrogen transformation pathways that when combined with the abundance of this sponge and previous data on dissolved inorganic nitrogen fluxes shows that this sponge is an important contributor to nitrogen cycling biogeochemistry on coral reefs we observed significant differences in gene expression of the archaeal amoA gene between coral reef locations consistent with differences in the fluxes of dissolved inorganic nitrogen previously reported In regards to symbiont metabolic potential the genes in the biosynthetic pathways of several amino acids were present in the prokaryotic metatranscriptome dataset but in the host-derived transcripts only the catabolic reactions for these amino acids were present A similar pattern was observed for the B vitamins (riboflavin These results expand our understanding of biogeochemical cycling in sponges and the metabolic interchange highlighted here advances the field of symbiont physiology by elucidating specific metabolic pathways where there is high potential for host-prokaryote interactions which have significantly advanced our understanding of the sponge-microbe relationship Any understanding of the metabolic capabilities of sponge symbionts and the mechanisms of interaction with the sponge host is still preliminary and in order to understand the ecological roles of sponges on coral reefs a characterization of symbiont metabolic potential and the interactions between symbionts and host is needed To better understand the microbially-mediated processes underlying the dynamics of nitrogen cycling in this ecologically important sponge and to gain insight into other potentially important metabolic processes expressed by the holobiont the RNA pool of the holobiont was sequenced Three compartments consisting of host mRNA and prokaryotic rRNA were bioinformatically separated from X muta individuals collected from coral reefs at each of three locations in the Caribbean This work expands our understanding of the metabolic diversity and activity present in sponge symbionts and provides target areas for further investigation into microbe-microbe interactions and host-microbe interactions From these sponge samples one replicate from each location was used for the metatranscriptome study The number of samples used for each analysis are as follows: all nine sponge samples were used in the gene specific analyses (N = 3 from each location) while one sponge sample from each location was used to generate the metatranscriptome the three sponges samples were pooled for assembly but were analyzed individually for EMIRGE analysis as described below and then pooled in equimolar concentration and sequenced using one lane on an Illumina HiSeq 2000 Sequencing was performed for non-overlapping paired-end reads ~100 nt in length and an average insert size of 240 nt (yielding ~380 M reads) Quality trimmed and filtered Fastq files were run through the program EMIRGE (Miller et al., 2011) which uses the expectation maximum algorithm to probabilistically reconstruct full-length ribosomal sequences using high throughput sequencing reads The parameters and databases used in EMIRGE analysis were optimized for working with our dataset while working within the range of the available computational power Quality of sequence reads produced from EMIRGE optimization runs were assessed manually by checking for excessive “N”s or homopolymer runs and by BLAST alignments The final parameters used included: a hand-curated SILVA 108 non-redundant SSU ribosomal database as the reference database The abundance estimate from EMIRGE that was used is the NormPrior, which is a length-normalized abundance estimate determined by the EMIRGE algorithm (Miller et al., 2011) Each sequence produced by EMIRGE is the result of merging sequences with greater than 97% similarity together at each iteration to form an operational taxonomic unit (OTU) EMIRGE was used separately for each of the three sponge samples rather than pooling reads from all three samples Because of the role that sponges play in the cycling of DIN the signature genes involved in nitrogen fixation (nitrogenase 16S rRNA genes) were selected as target amplification products Genomic DNA was used as the template in these gene-specific reactions three reactions of 25 μl were performed for each sample and pooled prior to electrophoresis The PCR consisted of 0.25 μl of 50× Titanium Taq polymerase (Clontech 2.5 μl of 10× Titanium Taq buffer for the second step of the nifH nested protocol 1 μl of the first PCR step was used as template Additional information on the amplification protocols for these genes is provided as supplemental information The triplicate reactions were pooled and electrophoresed on a 1% agarose gel and bands of appropriate size were extracted using Qiaquick gel extraction kit (Qiagen Gel extracted products were cloned in Escherichia coli using the pGEM-T easy vector system (Promega USA) and JM109 chemically competent cells according to manufacturers instructions (Promega) Transformed cells were sent to Functional Biosciences Inc USA) for sequencing on an ABI 3730xi DNA sequencer Chromatograms resulting from Sanger sequencing were manually checked for quality and vector sequence was trimmed in the program Geneious v4.8.4 (Biomatters Ltd.) Trimmed sequences were then queried by BLAST against the NCBI nr database using Geneious and matching sequences were compiled Pairwise alignments in Geneious were also performed for each sequence and its closest BLAST match which were then translated and manually checked for errors These sequences and the closest matches from BLAST queries were aligned (Geneious alignment algorithm with BLOSUM55 substitution matrix and default settings in Geneious) and the alignment was used to create a neighbor-joining tree in Geneious nifH and amoA (see below) gene sequences were deposited in GenBank [accession numbers JQ912215 – JQ912238 (nifH) The presence and amplification of archaeal amoA gene numbers and transcripts (gDNA and cDNA as templates) was confirmed using PCR methods described above Statistical tests were performed using R (R Core Team) and JMP v 10.0.2 In all three sponge samples the most abundant OTUs (OTUs with the highest NormPrior), were assigned to the phylum Proteobacteria, and within this phylum, most were assigned to the class Gammaproteobacteria (Figure 1) The second most abundant group of OTUs for the FL and LSI sponges were assigned to the candidate phylum Poribacteria Poribacteria classified OTUs were third most abundant behind Cyanobacterial OTUs (dominated by the genus Synechococcus spp) and Acidobacteria were also prominent OTUs in all three samples although these varied in abundance among the three with the highest abundance in the FL sponge compared to the LC and LSI sponges The classes within these phyla also varied between the sponges with Anaerolineae (Chloroflexi) more abundant in the LSI sponge than the FL and LC sponges Other notable groups in terms of known functional activity include archaeal OTUs (Euryarchaeota and Thaumarchaeota) Relative abundance of 16S ribosomal RNA operational taxonomic units (OTUs) generated by the program EMIRGE from total RNA short reads 16S rRNA OTUs were generated for one sponge from each location: Florida Keys (FL) Phyla are listed in the clockwise order of the pie chart The CLC Workbench assembly of non-ribosomal RNA reads yielded 35,219 contigs, or transcriptional features, with N50 = 1010, an average contig length of 979 bp, and GC content of 43% (Table 1) Results of comparative analysis between the two assemblies are provided in the Supplemental Information (SI) the CLC generated de novo assembly was selected for use in the analyses described below 3,727 contigs were assigned to Bacteria or Archaea Domains while 7,976 were assigned to the phylum Porifera based on the LCA algorithm results in MEGAN Most of the assembled prokaryotic contigs (i.e. transcripts) were classified by KEGG as metabolism (~19%) followed by genetic information processing (~10%) and environmental information processing (~7%) (Figure S1) and human disease represented less than 2% of transcripts amino acid metabolism had the highest proportion of transcripts (~30%) followed by energy metabolism (~22%) and metabolism of cofactors and vitamins (16%) The rest of the metabolism transcripts included lipid metabolism biosynthesis of polyketides and terpenoids and biosynthesis of other secondary metabolites (each <9%) More information on energy metabolism is provided in the Supplemental Information while transcripts involved in specific metabolic pathways of interest and select biosynthetic pathways are described below No transcripts involved in nitrogen fixation were recovered Relative abundance of prokaryotic and sponge transcripts involved in nitrogen metabolism MEGAN was used to visualize transcripts on the KEGG map The map was separated into assimilatory pathways (A) and mostly dissimilatory pathways (B) for visualization Pie charts near each enzyme number indicate the phyla represented by the transcripts and the number in the pie chart is the number of transcripts For clarity not all intermediates are shown Sulfur assimilation via different pathways in the host sponge and in the prokaryotic community was also observed (Figure 3) this included transcripts for the enzymes serine O-acetyltransferase (Cellvibrio sp. Sulfur assimilation related features from the host were mainly related to adenylylsulfate (APS) metabolism Relative abundance of prokaryotic and sponge transcripts involved in sulfur metabolism Relative abundance of prokaryotic and sponge transcripts involved in methane metabolism The map was separated into pathways centered on carbon monoxide and formate reactions (A) and methane reactions (B) for visualization The cyanobacterial nifH-deduced amino acid sequences were also similar to Xenococcus sp (87–89%) and the cyanobacterium UCYN-A (83–85%) Proteobacterial nifH-deduced amino acid sequences from the current study were most similar to either Alphaproteobacteria such as Bradyrhizobium japonicum (80–87%) or to Gammaproteobacteria such as Vibrio spp and Azotobacter chroococcum (95–96%) Seawater-derived nifH-deduced amino acid sequences generally clustered together within each cluster with the exception of sequence SW1.7 classified as Gammaproteobacteria Nitric oxide reductase gene (qnorB) sequences (n = 22) were successfully recovered from Xestospongia muta at all locations Gene-deduced amino acid sequences (qnorB) recovered from X muta were more similar to each other than to other known qnorB-deduced amino acid sequences from other bacteria and were ~36% similar to Alcaligenes faecalis (AM284323) One high quality sequence of the nitrate reductase gene Clone XmFL3m_3nirK (KJ020980) matched to several uncultured bacterial nirK genes as well as to Pseudomonas aeruginosa (AY345247 63% amino acid similarity) and Sinorhizobium sp Relative expression of archaeal amoA genes between geographic locations (A) and time points for LSI sponges only (B) Asterisk indicates significant difference [ANOVA The most abundant gene ontology (GO) assigned terms were different between the metatranscriptome (prokaryotic transcripts) and the sponge transcriptome (Figure S3) While the most abundant GO biological process for both sets of transcripts was oxidation-reduction for the prokaryotic dataset electron transport ribosome biogenesis and translation transcripts were the next most abundant serine family metabolism and proteolysis were the next most abundant GO biological processes while the biosynthetic pathway for histidine was represented by prokaryotic transcripts but also included several sponge transcripts (Figure S6) The sponge transcripts encoded histidine catabolism (Figure S6) Relative abundance of prokaryotic and sponge transcripts involved in lysine metabolism Numbers correspond to the following enzymes: (1) aspartate-semialdehyde dehydrogenase (2) homoserine dehydrogenase (3) L-aspartate-4-semialdehyde hydrolyase (4) 4-hydroxy-tetrahydrodipicolinate reductase (5) tetrahydropicolinate succinylase (6) LL-diaminopimelate aminotransferase (7) diaminopimelate epimerase (8) diaminopimelate decarboxylase (9) UDP-N-acetylmuramoyl-L-alanyl-D-glutamate-2,6,-diaminopimelate ligase (10) UDP-N-acetylmuramoyl-tripeptide-D-alanyl-D-alanine ligase Transcripts involved in vitamin biosynthetic pathways included those for biotin, riboflavin, thiamin(e), and pantothenate. The biotin (vitamin B7) biosynthetic pathway was represented by poribacterial and bacteroidetes transcripts for 7,8-diaminonanoate transaminase (Poribacteria, 74 and 78%) and biotin synthase (e.g., Poribacteria, 90%; Figure 7) Sponge transcripts encoded the enzyme holocarboxylase synthetase A similar trend was observed in the riboflavin (vitamin B2) biosynthetic pathway but with more prokaryotic phyla involved (Figure S7) was represented by proteobacterial transcripts (e.g. Both prokaryotic and sponge transcripts were involved in the conversions of FAD to/from riboflavin Transcripts for the thiamin (vitamin B1) biosynthetic pathway included genes involved many early precursor compounds but also important genes such as thiG (Figure S8) No transcripts involved in the final steps leading to thiamin phosphate and thiamin were recovered but sponge-derived transcripts did dominate the catabolism of thiamin Prokaryotic transcripts corresponding to cobalamin (vitamin B12) biosynthesis were also recovered (Table S1) Relative abundance of prokaryotic and sponge transcripts involved in biotin metabolism as well as organic solutes were recovered (Table S2) Host transcripts involved in the cellular responses (i.e. such as interleukin-1 receptor associated kinase 4-like (IRAK4) proteins heat-shock proteins) of the host to stress and/or bacteria or viruses that were homologous to A queenslandica predicted genes were recovered (see SI; Table S2) Eukaryotic-like domain containing proteins were detected in the metatranscriptome (prokayrotic) dataset including two transcriptional features encoding leucine-rich repeat containing proteins as well as tetratricopeptide repeat domains (TPR) and ankryin repeat domains (AR) (Table S1) but do not fall into a well-known functional category like Cyanobacteria and ammonia-oxidizing Archaea (AOA) Given the common occurrence of Firmicutes in both the EMIRGE analysis and transcript analysis in the current study they represent a target group for further analysis in terms of co-evolution with its host and their functional diversity and indicates that these processes likely have an important role in mediating nitrogen cycling on coral reefs were X Ammonia is also assimilated as a source of nitrogen for the prokaryotic community of Xestospongia muta (Fiore et al., 2013b) Analysis of transcripts related to nitrogen assimilation indicated that prokaryotic transcripts were involved in NH3 assimilation while sponge transcripts present were involved catabolism of amino acids This suggests that the main source of nitrogen for the sponge is heterotrophy; either dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) or particulate organic nitrogen (PON) whereas the prokaryotic community obtains most of its nitrogen from NH3 via glutamine synthetase and glutamate synthase (GS-GOGAT) pathways If there were transfer of nitrogen from symbionts to the sponge this would suggest that it may be in the form of amino acids or other nitrogenous compounds rather than as NH3 This notion is supported by the expression of genes encoding for the enzymes histidine ammonia lyase and aminomethyltransferase which are involved in amino acid metabolism and NH3 formation Coupling novel culturing approaches and focused genomic and transcriptomic analysis will be necessary to elucidate the physiology and ecology of methylotrophic organisms in sponges the potential methylotrophic activity by sponge-associated cyanobacteria This highlights the potential for future experimental studies examining the role of these two processes in establishing and maintaining the symbiosis Prokaryotic transcripts involved in the production of indole compounds via catabolism of tryptophan were recovered (e.g. highlighting the potential for microbe-microbe interactions or microbe-host interactions via these molecules transcripts corresponding to key thiamin biosynthesis genes were recovered including those corresponding thiG and thiC genes the only sequences representing Thaumarchaeota corresponded to a cysteine desulfurase which catalyzes an early step in thiamin biosynthesis While no transcripts identifying genes leading to thiamin production were recovered many of the key enzymes in the biosynthetic pathway were observed and sponge transcripts were recovered involved in the activation of thiamin (i.e. A similar pattern was observed for the riboflavin (vitamin B2) biosynthesis pathway with prokaryotic transcripts corresponding to the production of riboflavin and sponge transcripts corresponding to the conversion between riboflavin and the cofactors flavin mononucleotide (FMN) and flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) they may be able to obtain these metabolites from their food but hosting prokaryotes that provide a continuous source of these important metabolites might be more advantageous and predictable in time and space in a relatively nutrient poor environment The approach described here has provided novel insights into the metabolic potential of Xestospongia muta-associated prokaryotes and potential points of interaction between the sponge and its symbiotic prokaryotes Complementary methods of sequencing approaches along with physiological studies including metabolite studies are needed to effectively advance our understanding of host-microbe relationships in sponges The metabolic pathways described here provide specific target areas for future experimental studies focused on sponge-associated microbes Funding for this project was provided by The National Geographic Society NOAA National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology and Ocean Exploration Program and the National Science Foundation We thank Kazu Okamoto for a perl script for EMIRGE analysis Nathan D Olson for helpful discussions regarding data analysis and Sara Bender for constructive comments on the manuscript We also thank Amy Apprill and Matthew Neave for use of computing resources and advice on bioinformatic techniques The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2015.00364/abstract Production of H2 by sulphur-deprived cells of the unicellular cyanobacteria Gloeocapsa alpicola and Synechocystis sp PCC 6803 during dark incubation with methane or at various extracellular pH Metabolic integration between symbiotic cyanobacteria and sponges: a possible mechanism CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar A diverse assemblage of indole-3-acetate producing bacteria associate with unicellular green algae The role of dissolved organic matter bioavailability in promoting phytoplankton blooms in Florida Bay Development of PCR primer systems for amplification of nitrite reductase genes (nirK and nirS) to detect denitrifying bacteria in environmental samples Nitric Oxide Reductase (norB) genes from pure cultures and environmental samples Calvo, L., Cortey, M., García-Marín, J.-L., and Garcia-Gil, L. 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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited *Correspondence: Michael P. Lesser, University of New Hampshire, Rudman Hall, 46 College Rd., 03824 Durham, NH, USA,bXBsQHVuaC5lZHU= †Present Address: Cara L. Fiore, Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA; Micheline Labrie, School of Marine Science and Technology, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Dartmouth, MA, USA; Jessica K. Jarett, United States Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, CA, USA from “the Pearl of the Orient” to the Shining Wizard.By • -Earlier today Keiji Muto wrestled his last match ever as the Great Muta in the Yokohama Arena in Yokohama Muta is one of the first Japanese wrestlers that many American pro wrestling fans ever saw As many are saying their final “Bye-Bye” to Muta from his spectacular displays all over TBS for NWA/WCW through his work in New Japan Pro-Wrestling The Great Muta debuted in the NWA in March of 1989; his last match as a regular in the promotion was at the Clash of the Champions in January 1990 (he would return sporadically through the ‘90s including weird house-show matches like teaming with Stan Hansen against Sting and P.N he changed professional wrestling in America forever and became a legend Muta would also use the momentum from his run in the U.S He is one of only four wrestlers who have held all three major titles in Japan (the GHC Heavyweight Championship All Japan’s Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship came to legendary manager Gary Hart and asked him to create another Great Kabuki Kabuki was a huge star in the territories in the early 1980s He was managed by Hart and would wear elaborate face paint and blow green mist into the eyes of his opponents Hart didn’t want to recreate Kabuki, but did have the idea of creating Kabuki’s son. “I wanted to present him in a less scary manner than I had with his ‘father,’” Hart wrote in his book “I wanted to present this new character like he was a superhero that happened to be managed by a very bad guy.” a young Japanese wrestler with an amateur wrestling and judo background that was trained in the New Japan dojo in Florida as the White Ninja and in Puerto Rico and Texas as the Super Black Ninja The athleticism and flashy moves were there but without the presentation that Hart would bring Hart took Muto and gave him face paint like Kabuki he wanted the face paint to be more beautiful and artistic than terrifying and scary They dressed Muto in karate gis with elaborate designs—outfits that would get even more elaborate when Muto returned to Japan don’t wear what a normal person can afford,’” Muto remembered via email competing in a judo uniform that anyone can buy.” Young Muto was an athletic phenom: 6-foot-2, 245 pounds, with the agility and explosiveness of a much smaller man. His moonsault was a thing of beauty and grace and the kind of acrobatic dive that wrestling fans had never really seen on a big stage moves like Muta’s handspring elbow and his power drive elbow drop had the kind of athletic snap to them that was really missing from American wrestling at the time (a.k.a a scene that was dominated either by jacked-up power wrestlers like Hulk Hogan and the Road Warriors or technicians like Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat) who had some of that fast explosiveness when he debuted in the WWF Muta’s aesthetic was also effortlessly cool: colorful face paint and a herky-jerky wrestling style which really made him stand out Even with the stylistic inspirations from the Great Kabuki Muta was unique in the way few wrestlers really are; he created his own archetype and clearly served as an inspiration for the more athletic wrestling style which would come to the forefront in the 1990s and beyond Muta was a phenom from the start. He would wrestle enhancement talent on World Championship Wrestling or Main Event and his work would pop off the screen He quickly became one of the most popular wrestlers in the NWA despite ostensibly wrestling as a heel They had some of the most memorable matches of the 1980s matches which felt 10 years ahead of their time and I was so much like him…we were both around the same age and coming up at the same time,” Sting told The Ringer “[We were trying] to be innovative in our own ways and add something that perhaps no one else had done before.” saying that he and Muta “tried to be different tried to [think] out of the box,” saying that they would try “new attitudes even new moves” on their quest to “evolve with the wrestling industry.” And Sting stands firm in the fact that “Muta definitely did that in Japan and I think I did it here in the United States.” officially shifting the promotion focus from the stars of the previous era like Riki Choshu and defending the belt against his “father” Great Kabuki in June Muta lost the title to fellow “Musketeer” Hashimoto in August of 1993 and went back to wrestling He captured his second IWGP Heavyweight title in 1995, this time as Keji Muto, defeating Hashimoto. He held that title until the January 1996 Tokyo Dome show, where he lost it to Nobuhiko Takada (who was the leader of the UWFi army a shoot-style promotion that had invaded New Japan) The Great Muta would return as part of the nWo Japan angle, which found Muta playing a very similar role to Sting in the U.S This struggle leaned into the inherent duality of his character Muta would team with the nWo while Muto would be their opposition Muta won the internal struggle and became a full-time member of nWo Japan including wrestling on WCW Monday Nitro and Bash at the Beach as part of the nWo vs placing him squarely back in the forefront of Japanese wrestling Muto would defeat Toshiaki Kawada in a first-time inter-promotional dream match and then win the Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship from old rival Genichiro Tenryu where he was appointed president of the company This Triple Crown reign was a revelation; after looking shot in the ring Muto was back to having tremendous matches with Kawada and Taiyo Kea after most wrestling fans had written him off as a great worker Muto would continue to wrestle for All Japan for most of the next decade while also appearing sporadically for other promotions including brief stopovers in Ring of Honor and TNA he returned to New Japan and won the IWGP title from Shinsuke Nakamura while still wrestling primarily as part of All Japan he defeated Suwama to win All Japan’s Triple Crown title which meant that Muto was holding two of the major Japanese titles at the same time—one as Muto and one as Muta but I think it’ll be the last match I will ever have in Japan,” he says calling it “a goodbye for Sting as well.” It is a statement about what Muto has meant to professional wrestling that he could get cooperation from both AEW and WWE during his retirement tour; it would be hard to think of another wrestler with the juice to get that done the Great Muta was a gateway drug for hardcore wrestling fans; his run in the late ‘80s was years before the internet allowed fans easier access to Japanese wrestling Tracking down Japanese Great Muta matches was often one of the first things wrestling fans would do when they got on a Usenet board or found a tape-trader website The integration of styles from all over the world is what has defined 21st-century wrestling and in many ways that integration began the first time Muta showed up on SuperStation TBS spitting mist and flipping through the air But his accomplishments and mystique will be immortalized by the world's largest pro wrestling promotion forever The legendary Japanese wrestler will be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame this year An official announcement is expected later Wednesday on WWE digital series "The Bump" by old Muta rival Ric Flair PWInsider.com was the first to report the news was one of Japan's biggest wrestling stars of the 1990s and 2000s He is a four-time former IWGP heavyweight champion the designation used for New Japan Pro-Wrestling's top title and former GHC heavyweight champion with Pro Wrestling Noah and was one of the first Japanese wrestlers to achieve star status in the United States He had notable feuds with Sting and Flair and was also a member of the NWO Japan the wildly popular WCW group's offshoot in Japan which became a cult favorite in that country Muta was known for his haunting face paint spraying "poison mist" in opponent's faces with his mouth Shining Wizard and moonsault signature moves; and "The Muta Scale," a pro wrestling colloquialism to determine how much blood a wrestler had shed in a match The latter was inspired by one of the bloodiest matches in wrestling history: Muta vs The WWE Hall of Fame ceremony is scheduled for Mar Muta, 60, had a retirement tour last year into early this year, notably performing against current WWE star Shinsuke Nakamura on Jan WWE allowing one of its wrestlers to perform elsewhere is a rarity but that was how significant Muta and his retirement run was Muta's final matches included a tag match involving Sting and AEW wrestler Darby Allin New Japan headliner Tetsuya Naito and a short unexpected performance against longtime Muta friend and rival Masahiro Chono Lyra Valkyria and Great Muta also now available as WWE 2K24 DLC The WWE 2K24 DLC and Season Pass schedule is all done. It's been a great year for post-release WWE 2K24 additions and was later supplemented by Jade Cargill Read on for a full recap of every available pack and downloadable character There are two ways, both of which are fairly simple. You can either buy the Season Pass for £32.99/$39.99, or you can purchase individual packs – these cost £8.99/$9.99, which at the end is actually slightly cheaper than WWE 2K23 DLC which features an additional 200 Attribute Points and traditional SuperCharger – which unlocks all base game legends and additional arenas There’s a big focus on old school superstars in the WWE 2K24 DLC offering 14 playable old-school additions dropped in total and the first four landed as part of the ECW Punk Pack on May 15 They are Bubba Ray Dudley and D-Von Dudley – AKA the Dudley Boyz – along with Terry Funk and Sandman The latter is an especially cool inclusion as his last appearance was in WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2008 June 26’s Post Malone & Friends Pack added another four playable legends They’re joined by famed 1980s manager Jimmy Hart Michelle McCool then gatecrashed the squared circle as part of the Global Superstars Pack on September 18 A two-month break followed before the last batch of legends Japanese wrestling icon Great Muta in a WWE game The contemporary element of the WWE 2K24 Season Pass has been handled somewhat controversially. Let’s start with the good news: CM Punk arrived on May 15 as the first of six current-era stars. You can grab him as part of the ECW Punk Pack and it means that he’s in WWE 2K24 and on the AEW Fight Forever roster The list of additional Raw and Smackdown stars being added as DLC is a formidable one: in addition to Punk But we had to wait until September 18’s Global Superstars Pack to play as them That caused some serious debate among the community After an impressive selection of 12 up-and-comers last year such as Carmelo Hayes and Trick Williams Former NXT Women’s Champion Lyra Valkyria landed as part of the Global Superstars Pack on September 20, and that’s your lot as far as NXT is concerned. It’s an astonishing decision. Especially as Valkyria won that title in October 2023, and really should have been on the main WWE 2K24 roster Two intriguing celebrities do at least fortify the WWE 2K4 DLC roster There’s a series debut for Post Malone as part of the Post Malone & Friends Pack after the rapper curated this year’s soundtrack Pat McAfee followed him into the fray on July 31 The one-time Indianapolis Colts man forms part of the Pat McAfee pack McAfee has been on fan ‘most wanted’ lists for the last two years but seeing his buddies added to the game when we could have had Lash Legend or Lexis King from NXT is a huge gamble losing to both Tetsuya Naito and Masahiro Chono (who was also wrestling his retirement match) to end a historic we dug into the archives to present the full spectrum of Muto’s work in the squared circle From the early days of the Great Muta in the NWA to the debut of the Shining Wizard Clash of the Champions VIII: Fall Brawl ’89 and they had electricity that never really manifested itself in a singles match (their televised matches were good but not great and hopefully footage of the house show matches between these two will turn up some day) and they would just go after each other every time they were in the ring together The crowd was hot for every interaction in this match and all four men in the ring kept a breakneck pace; the match included a 1989 lucha dive train Sting following up with a pescado of his own and Slater just kind of stumbling over the top rope into the fray There were two great heat sections in this bout: one on Flair after Gary Hart drilled him with a roll of quarters which led to Flair running roughshod when he was tagged in (Flair didn’t really work a ton of babyface tag matches he is great as a babyface getting tagged in to clear the ring.) The finish was totally gnarly: Muta took out Sting with the deadly yellow mist and Slater used an arm cast to bust Flair open (and bump the ref) Funk then comes barreling from the back with a plastic bag and tries to suffocate Flair with it; it was one of the more brutal angles of the 1980s one which got a bunch of people in trouble with WTBS with Muto replacing Ali’s jabs with springboard dropkicks and handspring elbows There were a couple of huge highlights in the match Vader tried to crush Muto against the guardrail but missed and Muto followed up with his handspring elbow on the floor Muto later went for the same move in the ring and Vader snatched him out of the air mid-handspring and obliterated him with a German suplex If you told me that Muto retired directly after that move instead of 32 years later The finish was very cool; Vader went for an avalanche in the corner but dinged his knee and Muto was able to spin him into a roll-up for the pin The crowd responded by showering the ring with seat cushions to show their appreciation for the spectacle of it all This was the final of the 1995 G1 Climax and it was really the moment where Muto took the pole position among the Three Musketeers Muto had defeated Hashimoto for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship earlier in the year he took down his rival once again to win his first (and only) G1 Climax title Both guys had gone through grueling tournament blocks to get to this point; Muto had a bandage on his forehead after it was busted open multiple times during the tournament with Muto trying to take out Hashimoto’s knee to lessen the impact of his whipsaw kicks and Hashimoto working over Muto’s shoulder The match continued to build to a huge climax Muto landed on his feet but was met with a violent leg sweep that sent him flying and the impact reopened the wound on Muto’s forehead but Muto shifted enough that they both landed awkwardly Hashimoto inexplicably went to the top rope and tried an elbow but missed Muto then sprung to the top and tried a moonsault but crashed and burned Both wrestlers slowly climbed to their feet and gave viewers an incredible standoff like a pair of grizzled gunfighters in a spaghetti western It felt like the next big move would end the match whipping off a hurricanrana; he then sprung to the top rope and hit two big moonsaults for the win and the trophy the kind of grueling battle in which legends are made and it was possibly the best example of the Three Musketeers’ wrestling showing the drama and skill the group brought to wrestling at the time The best Japanese Great Muta matches were all about spectacle Shinzaki came to the ring bathed in white light with Buddhist shakyo all over his body; the story of this match was that Hakushi was a warrior monk who was coming to New Japan to cleanse it of its homegrown demon he unveiled a wooden grave marker to place on Muta’s final resting spot This was a match about individual memorable moments rather than ultimate coherence Muta was able to launch Shinzaki backward off the ring apron It looked extremely painful and is one of the most natural table spots I ever remember seeing Muta followed him and spiked him through a table with a piledriver Muta then grabbed Shinzaki’s wooden grave marker and used the jagged pieces to carve up Shinzaki’s forehead; soon Shinzaki’s white monk’s garb was completely stained red The bout was a bloody mess going forward; Muta wrapped the crimson Shinzaki’s white belt around his neck and wrote the kanji for “die” in blood on the shattered grave marker Shinzaki got one big burst of offense in as he ducked Muta’s mist and blasted him with chair shots before nailing Muta with his gorgeous Space Flying Tiger Drop handspring moonsault which was an amazing visual in a huge Tokyo Dome while he was covered in vibrant red blood Shinzaki then hit a missile shoulder block and a praying headbutt when Shinzaki went for his praying powerbomb finisher Cue the backbreaker and the moonsault and the win for the Great Muta but the things that did happen were awesome Most wrestling fans had written Muto off as a top worker after a bunch of semi-listless years as part of nWo Japan and a desultory stint in the spiraling Vince Russo era of WCW His “Pro-Wrestling Love” era was his Chris Paul–on-the-Suns moment showing everyone that he still could go out there and deliver at a high level This match involved two master performers who may have lost some of their athleticism but still had their abilities to craft a story and find those moments hitting a quick dropkick to the head and one to the knee He then grabbed Tenryu by the leg to set up a Dragon Screw only for Tenryu to block and grab a leg of his own Muto then jumped up and cracked him with the Shining Wizard Muto followed that up with a backbreaker and ran for a moonsault They did a great job of establishing Muto’s quick-strike ability showing that the Shining Wizard was a death move and letting people know that he could dim your lights with just one and while there were a lot of great wrestling matches that year Jim Sheridan WRESTLING legend The Great Muta has given British cuisine a brutal verdict The WWE Hall of Famer paid a visit to Old Trafford Wetherspoon's in Manchester over the weekend flew to the North West to attend a fan convention at the BEC Arena He met supporters and gave a talk at For the Love of Wrestling - but was less than taken with his food options Muta - real name Keiji Muto - popped into the Bishop Blaize by Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium He was joined by fellow wrestlers including Mark Henry and Debra McMichael Uploading a picture of his dish and a disgusted face to X, Muta spluttered: "As for ramen...what the heck is this?!" The wrestler also tackled a chicken katsu curry, which he declared was simply: "Okay." Despite his disastrous dinner, the wrestler wasn't put off entirely and returned to the same pub later in the weekend. This time he played things a little safer - ordering a steak and chips Muta is considered among the greatest and most influential of all time He spent 39 years in the ring and was a nine-time world champion he held 32 championships and also went by the names The Black Ninja Despite never appearing in the WWE he was inducted into the Hall of Fame following his retirement in 2023 Our journalists strive for accuracy but on occasion we make mistakes. For further details of our complaints policy and to make a complaint please click this link: thesun.co.uk/editorial-complaints/ March 31, 2023 at 3:45 pm CDTExpandPhil Muta holds up a copy of his first book, "Camp Laura," during a signing March 27 at PJ's Deli. Muta founded the Newton-based deli 37 years ago and has since transferred ownership to his son and daughter-in-law. Doing so allowed Muta to finally tell a story he had wanted to write for almost 40 years, long before he owned the deli. (Christopher Braunschweig) Phil Muta had a story stuck in his head for close to 40 years. At the age 80 and with his ownership of PJ’s Deli now transferred to his son and daughter-in-law, the Newton man finally found the spare time to memorialize an experience he had as a teenager working at a camp in Pennsylvania with four other friends. The book is called “Camp Laura,” and it is largely based on Muta’s true stories. At the behest of friends and family, he held a book signing this past week at the corner booth of PJ’s Deli behind the soda dispenser. He sat next to a dozen copies of his novel, which were arranged in three neat piles. On the cover is an illustration of a man and woman sitting in the back of a pickup. A cabin can be seen in the background. Of course, as the first chapter of the book mentions, many of the structures of that camp have long disappeared. Burned down, torn down, worn down. All that is left is Muta’s memories. When it came time to retell his stories and record his experiences into a novel, Muta said it turned into a “labor of love.” It was hard work, but well worth it. “It was like visiting an old friend,” he said. “Everybody has a story in them. This was my story that I had to get out. I wish everybody would write about their stories. It kind of writes your story in stone when you publish something. It’s nice to write something that you love and care about.” In addition to the fond memories he had hanging out with his friends, the camp was also where Muta found his first girlfriend, who was a camper. The book also recalls all the trouble Muta and his friends got into and the interactions they had with the other campers. It should make readers laugh and even feel sad at parts. With one book down, Muta is enjoying his fourth career as an author. Prior to owning PJ’s Deli — which has been serving the Newton community for 37 years — he enlisted in the military and then worked for Western Union. Which means Muta wanted to write and publish “Camp Laura” before he ever owned the deli. “I started the idea maybe 30 or 40 years ago, and I didn’t start writing it until just recently,” he said. “But I had always wanted to do it. I kept putting it off, kept putting it off. Everybody can write a book, but it’s real hard to sit down and start. I wish everybody would start. I wish people would put their stories down on paper.” Phil Muta signs a copy of his first book, "Camp Laura," during a book signing March 27 at PJ's Deli in Newton. "Camp Laura" is based on the real experiences Muta had as a teenager working at a camp in Pennsylvania. The 80-year-old wanted to tell this story for several decades but did not find the time until recently. (Christopher Braunschweig) While some of the story elements may be heightened for dramatic purposes, Muta maintains the book is still very close to what really happened. The nicknames of himself and his friends — like Kuni and Lats and Clock, for instance — remain intact. The more he aged, the more Muta found himself reminiscing of the time he had at the camp. For some reason, he said, the older you get, the more you think of your younger days. Of course, he also feared he might forget his story as time went on, which made Muta even more determined to finish “Camp Laura.” Muta said, “It’s almost like the older you get, the more you go back and the more you remember or revisit your youth. I don’t know why that is. That’s what this book is about, just revisiting my youth. I learned that life throws a lot of curveballs at you. Sometimes you hit them. Sometimes you strike out.” Whether he knocked it out of the park or will be sitting on the bench the rest of the game, Muta is glad to have revisited his youth and finished a story he had wanted to tell for almost four decades. He also learned he did not go through life alone and shared experiences with many people he loved. “You know, you never go through this life alone. You always have your friends. Without them it would really be a miserable life.” Christopher BraunschweigChristopher Braunschweig has a strong passion for community journalism and covers city council, school board, politics and general news in Newton, Iowa and Jasper County. Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt founded MoviePass but eventually lost control of the company—and the narrative Filmmaker Muta’Ali is helping them take it back Stacy Spikes (front) and Hamet Watt [Photo: Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images] BY Joe Berkowitz Business stories involving a meteoric rise followed by a spectacular collapse naturally lend themselves to movies, whether it’s a feature like BlackBerry or a documentary like Fyre Fraud whose business proposition was “helping people see more movies,” ended up inspiring one itself “It’s rare that you get to see stories where Black entrepreneurs rise to such heights in terms of the value of their companies,” says Muta’Ali, director of MoviePass, MovieCrash “And it’s even rarer when feature docs are made about them.” MoviePass exploded seemingly out of nowhere in the summer of 2017 when CEO Mitch Lowe lowered its price from $40-$50 per month to $9.99 the company officially launched six years earlier and tried for years to cut a deal with a major theater chain The company clawed its way to more than 10,000 subscribers by 2016 but had a hard time securing further funding After the latest potential lifeline from AMC fell through a venture capitalist with a board seat at MoviePass gave Spikes an ultimatum: Either allow him to bring in a new CEO or Kelly would walk who had been an executive at Netflix in its infancy Now fronted by a gray-haired white guy with red-hot Netflix credentials MoviePass quickly secured more funding—mostly from analytics firm Helios + Matheson which bought a majority stake in the company Lowe and Helios honcho Ted Farnsworth landed on the $9.99 price point in that this price was so suspiciously cheap it fetched the company millions of dollars in free PR all this news coverage advertised what was quite clearly an unsustainable business model MovieCrash begins: with clip after clip of Lowe and Farnsworth on various news shows boasting about their company’s rocket ride to the moon where he is billed as the company’s “former COO”—the position he was shunted off to before eventually being fired in January of 2018 In an effective bit of cinematic sleight-of-hand Muta’Ali allows viewers to assume Lowe created the company during the film’s first 15 minutes—which depict how the rocket blew up—before backing up to reveal the rocket’s actual engineers The filmmaker and his team deliberated over this unique aspect of the documentary’s structure for a long time “We definitely wanted to honor that [Spikes] and [Watt] are the founders of MoviePass but there is a huge audience out there who knows about MoviePass and have only heard of [Lowe] and [Farnsworth],” Muta’Ali says “And if the premise of this story has anything to do with presumptions about people then playing into people’s presumptions is something that would be beneficial to us if we’re trying to be creative with the story.” People’s presumptions seem to have played a large part in why Spikes had been unable to get more funding before Kelly’s ultimatum. After all, only 1% of all venture capital reportedly goes into startups built by Black entrepreneurs is what helped MoviePass secure more funding after he took charge Spikes still struggled against people’s presumptions while getting the company off the ground Muta’Ali says he uncovered a specific example of this phenomenon during production though it didn’t make it into the finished film told me that in the early days of MoviePass they’d go to these meetings with [Spikes] and when they walked in the room people would assume that they were the CEO just because they were white,” the filmmaker says Muta’Ali was excited that Spikes gave his business story a happy ending late into production the filmmaker also now understands why the entrepreneur lost control of it in the first place “I would’ve made the same decision as [Spikes] when he was told he could either step down as CEO or lose Chris Kelly from the board,” he says I would rather have the opportunity for my company to make it The final deadline for Fast Company’s Brands That Matter Awards is Friday, May 30, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today. Joe Berkowitz is an opinion columnist at Fast Company. His latest book, American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World, is available from Harper Perennial. More Fast Company & Inc © 2025 Mansueto Ventures Fastcompany.com adheres to NewsGuard’s nine standards of credibility and transparency. Learn More Volume 14 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1112910 This article is part of the Research TopicDiscrete Emotions in Environmental Decision-MakingView all 8 articles Concern about climate change is often rooted in sympathy Feeling sympathy for others temporarily forms a bond between them and us: we focus on what we have in common and feel a sense of common destiny we temporarily experience communal sharing relationships A sudden intensification in communal sharing evokes an emotion termed kama muta We conducted four pre-registered studies (n = 1,049) to test the relationship between kama muta and pro-environmental attitudes participants first reported their attitudes about climate change they received climate change-related messages they saw one of the two moving video clips about environmental concerns participants listened to a more or less moving version of a story about a typhoon in the Philippines also moving version of this story or an unrelated talk they watched either a factual or a moving video about climate change Participants then indicated their emotional responses they indicated their intentions for climate mitigation actions we measured time spent reading about climate-related information (Studies 1 we found that feelings of kama muta correlated positively with pro-environmental intentions (r = 0.48 [0.34 0.62]) and behavior (r = 0.10 [0.0004 we did not obtain evidence for an experimental effect of the type of message (moving or neutral) on pro-environmental intentions (d = 0.04 [−0.09 though this relationship was significantly mediated by felt kama muta across Studies 2–4 The relationship was not moderated by prior climate attitudes We also found an indirect effect of condition through kama muta on donation behavior our results contribute to the question of whether kama muta evoked by climate-change messages can be a motivating force in efforts at climate-change mitigation a new consensus on the urgency of measures to mitigate climate change needs to emerge will make people feel the urgency and increase their willingness to act on it And what role do their emotional responses to climate change messages play in feeling this urgency We propose here that a particular emotional response to climate change messages We will first briefly review how media content can provoke emotions that motivate climate action and then derive our hypotheses on kama muta as a motivating force We then present an overview of the four studies we conducted to test these assumptions However, information typically is not enough to motivate individuals to engage in climate actions (Abrahamse et al., 2005). For example, media coverage in Germany on the UN Climate Summit did not motivate Germans to engage in climate action (Brüggemann et al., 2017). Instead, emotions lend urgency to information (Tomkins, 1962) emotional responses to climate change messages can be expected to predict a message’s motivational impact but may not suffice to initiate and sustain climate action are two self-transcendent emotions that have been examined in relation to climate change messages Awe about natural and social events that were unconnected to climate change increased the likelihood of engaging in environmental behaviors in Chinese college students via higher connectedness to nature (Yang et al., 2018) or lower social dominance orientation (Zhao et al., 2018). Comparing the effects of neutral, amusing, and elevating videos showing altruism, Moreton et al. (2019 but indirect effects of the elevation video condition on increased willingness to sacrifice for the environment and on intentions to engage in 12 environmental behaviors through a composite of self-transcendent emotions and connectedness to nature The composite of the self-transcendent emotions correlated 0.60 with connectedness to nature the elevation videos increased connectedness to nature despite not being about the natural environment and to the extent that participants responded emotionally and felt more connected to nature after watching the video and they were also moved to protect the environment Similarly, another study found indirect, but no direct, effects of viewing short videos on willingness to sacrifice to protect the environment and on donations to The Nature Conservancy (Diessner et al., 2022) compared with a video on flute making or a video showing rocks in the desert promoted willingness and donations through elevation A video depicting an altruistic Thai man promoted willingness and donations through awe and elevation The level of the visual beauty of the videos positively predicted willingness and donations self-transcendent emotions may indeed play an important role in motivating climate action the reviewed studies did not focus on evoking self-transcendent emotions about climate change there is a need to investigate self-transcendent emotions induced by climate change messages which do not deny the saddening and worrying aspects of climate change awe and elevation are self-transcendent but not clearly relational according to their definitions We wanted to study an emotion that is felt when relating to others and there is reason to believe that it can motivate climate action the trait associated with responding with compassion and tender feelings to the suffering of other beings evoked by videos and autobiographical recollections They characterized compassion as a subset of kama muta evoked by another’s need They found increased support for climate policies in the compassion condition and mediated via compassion and belief in anthropogenic drought These findings suggest that kama muta evoked by feeling closer to others in need indeed increases the motivation to mitigate climate change expect that climate-related media content can evoke kama muta which in turn increases motivation to mitigate climate change We conducted four preregistered studies to test the relationship between feelings of kama muta and pro-environmental attitudes, intentions, and behavior. An overview of procedures and measures across these four studies is provided in Table 1 we used different videos (Studies 1 and 4) and audio clips (Studies 2 and 3) that focused on climate change-related aspects Next to assessing pro-environmental intentions across all studies we measured actual behavior as operationalized by time spent on reading about climate-related information (Studies 1 visiting external websites related to climate change (Study 1) we tested similar registered hypotheses focusing on the relationship between feelings of kama muta and pro-environmental intentions and behavior as well as on the effects of controlling for attitudes As hypotheses depended on different designs we report the respective hypotheses at the beginning of each study All studies were evaluated and approved by the ethical review board of the University of Oslo Study 1 was designed to test two pre-registered hypotheses: H1 Kama muta evoked by a pro-environmental message predicts intentions of pro-environmental behavior and actual behavior positively The association of kama muta with intentions of pro-environmental behavior and actual behavior is moderated by environmental attitude The more pro-environmental a person’s attitude is before seeing the message the more her experience of kama muta will increase intention and actual behavior Power analyses for an expected small to medium effect (r = 0.20)1 resulted in 150 participants with a power of 0.80 and an alpha level of 0.05 using G*Power 3 (Faul et al., 2007). Based on recent recommendations for correlational studies, we aimed to sample at least 160 participants (Schönbrodt and Perugini, 2013) A total of 142 psychology undergraduates were recruited from the University of Oslo in exchange for partial course credit Based on pre-registered exclusion criteria 62 participants were excluded from this study if they did not attempt at least 50% of the questionnaire or/and did not watch the whole video clip 163 participants were recruited from Amazon Mturk 19 participants were excluded from this study These participants completed the study in English The final sample consisted of 224 participants (99 females aged 17 to 69 years (M = 31.84 The research design of the study was correlational as it examined the relationship between (1) kama muta and intentions of pro-environmental behavior and (2) kama muta and actual behavior. After providing informed consent, participants were shown one video clip (about 2 min each) about environmental concerns selected randomly from two video clips preselected by the research team to be moving (see Supplementary material for video clips) One video clip featured the spoken word artist and activist Prince Ea recounting how humans have damaged the planet and emphasizing that change can only be achieved if all stand together told the story about a sustainable future planet highlighting that it can only be achieved if humans work together and start acting Participants were then asked to complete a questionnaire after watching the video clip “I am concerned about global climate change.”; α = 0.93) on a 5-point scale After watching the video clip, participants’ feelings about kama muta were assessed using a short form of the Kama Muta Multiplex Scale (KAMMUS-S; Zickfeld et al., 2019) We included three items on sensations (“moist eyes or cried,” “chills or goosebumps,” and “warm feeling in the chest”) “I felt or observed an incredible bond”) and three items measuring emotion labels (“It was heartwarming,” “I was moved,” and “I was touched”) we included two items asking whether the video made participants feel angry or anxious All responses were made on 7-point scales ranging from 0 (Not at all) to 6 (A lot) Items targeting sensations and emotion labels were averaged into a kama muta score (α = 0.91) and items targeting appraisals into a communal sharing score (α = 0.94) Afterward, participants answered 11 items on their environmental intentions (“Based on your environmental concern, how likely are you to,” e.g., “reduce your meat consumption,” “become active in an environmental organization”; α = 0.92) on Likert scales from 1 (Very unlikely) to 5 (Very likely) (adapted from Dietrich, 2013) These items were averaged into an intention index participants were presented with country-specific information on climate change including three links to (1) information sites The actual behavior of the participants was measured based on the number of links clicked in the study about (1) information sites reading time spent on the page presenting the links was calculated and demographic information was collected Overview of the relationship between kama muta and pro-environmental intentions across the four studies Gray shaded area indicates 95% confidence intervals Blue represents the US and yellow is Norway In addition, we performed linear regression with reading time as the dependent variable, the kama muta score as the independent variable, and the country as a factor and its interaction with the kama muta score (Table 2) We found that experiencing kama muta positively predicted actual reading time The country also positively predicted reading time with Norwegian times being on average higher than the ones of the US sample we observed no significant interaction effect between the kama muta score and the country p = 0.640 (US: r = 0.16 [0.00 The first study presented a correlational test of the hypothesis that feelings of kama muta evoked by videos on climate change are associated with pro-environmental intentions We found that kama muta was indeed positively associated to act pro-environmentally also when controlling for prior pro-environmental attitudes This effect was smaller in the Norwegian sample which might be because the Norwegian participants showed lower kama muta ratings for the videos than the US sample We did not find evidence that this effect was higher for participants endorsing strong attitudes on the importance of addressing climate change we observed that strong experiences of kama muta were associated with higher pro-environmental intentions regardless of participants’ prior attitudes Although this finding was not consistent across climate attitude measures we will focus on replicating the pattern in Study 2 to say more about its validity we also found a small positive association with how long participants spent on a page presenting pro-environmental information used as a proxy for actual pro-environmental behavior namely whether participants clicked on links was not usable due to a technical failure in the Norwegian sample there was a low percentage of clicking these links such as time constraints in finishing the study on Amazon MTurk had a stronger importance than experiences of kama muta While we presented a first correlational test of our main hypothesis in Study 1 ads about climate change are likely to evoke a spectrum of different emotions could increase pro-environmental intentions Our exploratory correlational results in the present study did not support this idea we controlled for other emotional reactions in a more systematic fashion we wanted to test an experimental effect of kama muta on pro-environmental intentions moving beyond the correlational findings of the first study Does listening to a personal account of a victim of climate change-related floods lead to more intention for various types of climate action than a more impersonal account of the same event independent of prior climate attitude and other emotions evoked Is this effect mediated by increased kama muta we ran Study 2 with the following pre-registered hypotheses: H1 neutral) influences the amount of kama muta experienced such that participants feel the most kama muta in the personal condition; H2 The amount of kama muta evoked by the story predicts (a) intention and (b) reading time when controlling for prior climate attitude When controlling for the type of story (personal vs kama muta significantly predicts intentions and reading time Before data collection, we performed a power analysis for a mediation model expecting small effects (β = 0.20) setting the power at 0.80 and the alpha level at 0.05. Employing an application by Schoemann et al. (2017) we obtained a final sample size recommendation of 255 participants aged 19 to 70 years (M = 35.14 we employed a between-subjects design with two different audio clips (personal story participants listened to a short story about a typhoon in the Philippines participants heard an account of the flood with a story of the personal connection between mother and daughter and of finding a new family in the global climate change movement participants heard a summary of the flood and a brief extract from a speech of the Philippine representative at the FN summit in New York participants indicated their concern about the climate using the CCAS as used in Study 1 (α = 0.96) The mood of the participants was also evaluated based on six items (“I’m stressed,” “I worry,” “I’m alert,” “I have difficulty focusing,” “I feel good,” and “I feel bad”) on a 5-point scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (completely) participants completed the same kama muta items with regard to sensations again computing the same kama muta (α = 0.89) and communal sharing scores (α = 0.89) and sadness (α = 0.77) responses were measured with three items each All responses were completed on the same 7-point scale ranging from 0 (Not at all) to 6 (Very much) participants completed questions regarding the topic of the audio clip and whether they had experienced technical problems Participants then indicated their climate-action intentions in response to 26 items created for the current study and based on previous intention scales such as the one from Study 1. The idea was to cover a range of different climate-action intentions, personal, political, practical, and communicative, focused on climate change mitigation specifically. An exploratory factor analysis indicated a four-factor solution (see Supplementary Figure S1) Five items were dropped because they loaded on several factors and the final four factors focused on intentions (1) to learn more about climate change (α = 0.96) “I am interested in seeking out information about how the environment is impacted by humans”; (2) to discuss the report and share it with others (α = 0.95; six items) “I intend to discuss the clip with others”; (3) to change one’s personal behavior (α = 0.86; four items) “I intend to eat less meat”; and (4) to support climate policies or groups (α = 0.91; five items) “I would volunteer or campaign for an organization aiming to reduce global warming.” The items were answered on a Likert scale from 1 (not at all true) to 5 (completely true) or 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) Instructions asked participants to “indicate to what extent the following statements are true of you right now.” An intention index was calculated by averaging all items (α = 0.97) Afterward, participants completed the seven-item trait empathic concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983) on a Likert scale from 1 (Does not describe me well) to 5 (Describes me very well) (α = 0.94) After completing the demographic information participants were provided with information related to the audio clip and climate change in general They were instructed that they could finish the study or read through the information We recorded how long participants stayed on the page presenting the information using a timer Again, as pre-registered the reading time variable was log-transformed before analysis. As in Study 1, we employed two measures assessing intentions and behavior: (1) the intention index (2) and the reading time measure. An overview of correlations among the main variables is provided in Supplementary Table S6 we performed an independent samples Welch’s t-test with the kama muta score as the dependent variable and condition as the independent variable We found that the kama muta score differed significantly for condition Cohen’s d = 0.52 [0.25 the personal story (M = 2.77 SD = 1.55) evoked higher scores than the neutral story (M = 1.98 we found a similar effect for communal sharing appraisal ratings (d = 0.70 [0.43 For H2, we performed linear regression with intention as the dependent variable and prior climate attitudes, kama muta score, anger, sadness, and anxiety indices as the independent variables. An overview of the results is presented in Table 3. When controlling for prior climate attitude, anger, sadness, and anxiety, we found that experiencing kama muta positively predicted intentions (see Figure 1) we found that anger predicted intentions positively and sadness negatively we found that climate attitudes also positively predicted intentions anxiety did not predict intentions significantly We then performed the same analysis with reading time as the dependent variable (see Table 4) we found that experiencing kama muta did not significantly predict reading time we observed that sadness positively predicted reading time An exploratory model with only the kama muta score as the predictor indicated that kama muta positively predicted reading time with a similar effect as observed in Study 1 we performed linear regression with intention as the dependent variable We found that experiencing kama muta positively predicted intentions the personal story became a negative predictor of intentions when controlling for experienced kama muta and other variables we found only a small non-significant effect of our manipulation in the opposite direction for both intentions d = −0.07 [−0.33 d = −0.06 [−0.32 suggesting slightly more intentions and reading time after the neutral story the neutral story) had a positive indirect effect on intentions via experiencing kama muta This indirect effect was held when controlling for prior climate attitudes we performed linear regression with reading time as the dependent variable we observed that sadness positively and statistically significantly predicted reading time Similar to the previous model, we observed that kama muta mediated the effect of condition on reading time, b = 0.04, B = 0.08 [95% Bootstrap CI: 0.02, 0.19] (Supplementary Table S15) this indirect effect did not hold when controlling for climate attitude or evoked sadness We ran another mediation model with the story (personal vs. neutral) as the predictor, intentions as the outcome, and communal sharing as the mediator. We observed that communal sharing partially mediated the effect, b = 0.13, B = 0.26 [95% Bootstrap CI: 0.15, 0.40], while the negative effect of condition on intentions again became stronger (Supplementary Table S15) we explored the association of different intention subscales with kama muta We observed that kama muta ratings showed stronger relationships to share information (r = 0.58 [0.48 0.66]) than to seek information related to global warming (r = 0.44 [0.33 to act by reducing one’s carbon footprint (r = 0.35 [0.22 0.46]) or supporting environmental organizations (r = 0.32 [0.20 we replicated our main findings from Study 1 and expanded our findings by providing an experimental test of our hypothesis and controlling more systematically for other experienced emotions we found that kama muta was associated with an increase in climate-action intentions and reading time The association with intentions also held when controlling for prior attitudes toward climate change this was not the case for the association of kama muta with reading time Regarding a potential moderation of these effects by prior climate attitudes we found different patterns in Studies 1 and 2 we will explore a potential moderation again We did not find evidence that our experimental manipulation of a personal versus a neutral story about a typhoon influenced intentions or reading time we found evidence that this was the case indirectly via feelings of kama muta (and increased communal sharing) we aimed at replicating these findings using different measures and a more neutral control condition to provide convergent validity of our findings Does listening to a personal account of a victim of climate change-related floods lead to more intention for various types of climate action than a control audio file independent of prior climate attitude and other emotions evoked We tested the same hypotheses as in Study 2: H1 neutral) influences the amount of kama muta experienced such that participants feel the most kama muta in the personal condition The amount of kama muta evoked by the story predicts intention when controlling for prior climate attitude kama muta significantly predicts intentions Based on the findings from the previous study we performed an a priori power analysis for a mediation model using an online application expecting small effects (path a: b = 0.20 path b: b = 0.35) setting the power at 0.80 and the alpha level at 0.05 We obtained a final sample size recommendation of 185 participants aged 18 to 57 years (M = 23.37 The majority indicated Norwegian as their nationality (190) Participants received partial course credit for participating in the study The majority completed the study in Norwegian while eight participants chose the English version The research design of this study was again a between-subjects design We again employed an audio clip that either presented a similar personal story about a typhoon in the Philippines as in Study 2 or a neutral story of a TED talk focusing on trying something new each day for a month (personal story participants completed the same measures with regard to kama muta labels We calculated the same kama muta (α = 0.85) communal sharing (α = 0.85) and anxiety (α = 0.92) indices as in Study 2 Finally, participants completed several items on attitudes toward (climate) refugees not focal to the current purposes.7 In the end participants completed demographic information and were debriefed We repeated the same pre-registered analyses as in Study 2, except those referring to reading time. We also performed analyses separately on this index for the general intentions and the intentions to share the message with others, which can be found in Supplementary Table S10. An overview of correlations among the main variable is provided in Supplementary Table S9 we performed a Welch’s t-test with the kama muta score as the dependent variable and condition as the independent variable the personal story (M = 2.60 SD = 1.30) evoked higher kama muta scores than the neutral story (M = 1.35 SD = 1.40) evoked higher communal sharing ratings than the neutral story (M = 1.07 For H2, we performed linear regression with intention as the dependent variable and climate attitudes, kama muta score, anger, sadness, and anxiety indices as the independent variables as in Study 2. An overview of the results is presented in Table 3. When controlling for climate attitude, anger, sadness, and anxiety, we found that experiencing kama muta positively predicted intentions (see also Figure 1) climate attitudes also positively predicted intentions and anxiety did not predict intentions significantly We repeated the same model and added condition as an additional predictor intentions were positively predicted by climate attitudes (b = 0.46 [0.35 and this time also anger (b = 0.16 [0.01 Sadness (b = 0.07 [−0.15 0.29]) and fear (b = −0.01 [−0.19 0.17]) did not show statistically significant effects condition predicted intentions negatively (b = −0.25 [−0.41 we did not observe a statistical significant effect of our manipulation on intentions The personal story evoked higher intentions (M = 46.19 SD = 22.0) than the neutral story (M = 43.05 though this effect was rather small and statistically non-significant We replicated our findings from Study 2 that kama muta positively predicts climate-action intentions when controlling for other emotions and climate attitudes we found only a small and non-significant direct effect of the experimental condition on intentions and observed that this relationship was mediated by felt kama muta as in Studies 1 and 2 we employed two types of video stimuli on climate change to study their direct and indirect effects on intentions via kama muta we have also mainly focused on studying pro-environmental intentions we added a behavioral measure by allowing participants to donate parts of their earnings to environmental organizations We preregistered three main hypotheses: H1 Pro-environmental intentions and behavior are positively associated with self-reported kama muta controlling for prior climate attitudes and other emotions; H2 Pro-environmental intentions and behavior will be stronger in the kama muta condition; H3 The relationship between the main manipulation and pro-environmental intentions or behavior is mediated by self-reported kama muta we primarily focused on the experimental effect of kama muta on intentions This effect was rather small in Study 3 (d = 0.14) but we expected a stronger difference due to more carefully controlled manipulations of at least magnitude d = 0.30 Employing G*Power 3.0 at an alpha level of 0.05 and a one-tailed test suggested a final sample size of 382 we pre-registered our final sample size at 400 A total of 400 participants were recruited through the crowdsourcing website Prolific.ac requesting participants with US nationality 15 participants were excluded from this study as they did not attempt at least 50% of the questionnaire (0) spent less than 3 min on the total survey (0) spent less than 90% of the time of the video on the page presenting the video (15) and/or failed an attention check question (0) The final sample size consisted of 385 participants (181 females aged 18 to 73 years (M = 36.27 The majority indicated US American as their nationality (379) Participants received $2.60 for participating in the study and a possible bonus payment of up to $1 After providing informed consent and completing items about their demographic background (gender, age, nationality, number of children, and ownership of pet(s)), participants completed the 15 items of the Climate Change Attitude Survey as used in Study 2 (α = 0.93; Christensen and Knezek, 2015) and the seven items of the trait empathic concern (EC) subscale of the IRI (α = 0.88) as in Study 2 To shift the focus away from their attitudes toward climate change participants then completed five filler items two involving the sorting of odd or even numbers/words Participants were then shown one of the two videos and we recorded the amount of time they spent on the page with a timer We then included the same four communal sharing appraisal items as in the previous studies (α = 0.95) All of the emotion and communal sharing items were completed on a 7-point scale from 0 (not at all) to 6 (very much) If participants indicated that they felt angrier or more moved/touched (defined by choosing a scale point of 3 or higher) they were asked to briefly write about what angered them or made them feel moved/touched participants completed the same Climate Intention Scale as in Study 3 (α = 0.94; general intentions α = 0.91; sharing with others α = 0.94) and were presented with a donation possibility participants were told that they would receive a bonus payment of $1 for participating in the study and that they could choose to donate as much of this as they wanted to one out of four non-governmental organizations It was explained that participants might choose to donate all or none of the money without consequences for their participation in the study We pre-selected four non-governmental organizations for this study: World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and we included a link to their main website for further information We decided to include three NGOs mainly focusing on environmental topics and one NGO focusing on human rights to explore the impact of domain-related donations We told participants that we would make donations after the study and they had the opportunity to leave their email addresses in a different unrelated survey so that we could send them an email with an overview of the final amount of money donated and proof of the receipts 62.08%) donated at least some part of their bonus while 142 decided not to donate any of their bonus (M = $0.38 Four participants failed to complete the question and according to our instructions we donated the full amount on their behalf Most participants selected Rainforest Alliance (n = 84; M = $0.65 followed by WWF (n = 72; M = $0.53 As registered, reading time of the charity descriptions was log-transformed. An overview of the correlations among the main variables is provided in Supplementary Table S11; Figure 1 we tested whether the experimental video indeed evoked more self-reported kama muta (registered manipulation check) We conducted two Welch’s t-tests with condition (−0.5 = control 0.5 = kama muta video) as the predictor and self-reported kama muta feelings and sensations and self-reported communal sharing intensifications as outcomes the kama muta video evoked more self-reported kama muta feelings (M = 1.70 SD = 1.27) and appraisals (M = 2.66 SD = 1.57) than the control video (feelings: M = 0.48 Considering donation behavior (focusing only on no donations or donations toward pro-environmental organizations), we found no significant association with kama muta when controlling for climate attitudes and other emotions (see Table 5) Climate attitudes and hope turned out to be the only significant predictors of actual donation behavior kama muta positively predicted donation behavior (r = 0.10 [−0.003 although this effect was not statistically significant we performed three Welch’s t-tests with 1) intentions and 3) reading time as outcomes and condition as the predictor None of these measures differed significantly across the two videos Intentions were higher after the moving video (M = 46.53 SD = 27.00) than after the neutral video (M = 45.28 but this difference was negligible (d = 0.05 [−0.15 Donations were higher after watching the neutral video (M = 0.39 SD = 0.41) compared to the moving video (M = 0.37 but this difference was again negligible (d = −0.04 [−0.25 reading time was higher after watching the moving video (M = 2.68 SD = 1.01) compared to the neutral video (M = 2.56 but this effect was again rather small (d = 0.12 [−0.08 Feeling manipulated was associated with decreased pro-environmental intentions (r = −0.24 [−0.33 donation behavior (r = −0.15 [−0.25 and time spent (r = −0.09 [−0.19 but not substantially with kama muta (r = −0.009 [−0.11 the association between kama muta ratings and intentions to share the information with others (r = 0.54 [0.46 0.60]) was slightly stronger than with more general intentions (r = 0.47 [0.39 Forest plot of the random effects meta-analysis between kama muta and intentions across Studies 1 to 3 Forest plot of random effects meta-analysis between reading time (log) and kama muta across Studies 1 and 2 Note that the lower confidence interval is 0.0004 Forest plot of random effects meta-analysis of pro-environmental intentions between conditions (personal vs In four studies, we investigated the role of emotions, and particularly that of kama muta, in willingness to act on climate change. Based on previous findings (e.g., Zickfeld et al., 2017; Seibt et al., 2019; Landmann and Rohmann, 2020; Grüning and Schubert, 2022) we hypothesized that media content focusing on others in need or highlighting common fates could evoke feelings of kama muta which in turn would be associated with one’s motivation to act on climate change The results of four studies confirmed that emotions elicited through media content were positively associated with pro-environmental attitudes and intentions feelings of kama muta evoked through environmental media content were associated with climate-action intentions in all studies also when controlling for prior attitudes and feelings of anger Although all four studies showed associations between evoked kama muta and intentions to act on climate change results were less consistent when considering the association between kama muta and actual pro-environmental actions Studies 1 and 2 suggested that feelings of kama muta weakly predicted reading time on a page presenting pro-environmental information Study 4 found a small association between kama muta and donation behavior What are the practical implications of these results we will first discuss the measurement choices we made regarding intentions and actions then discuss the meaning of the indirect effects compare kama muta to other emotions we measured we measured pro-environmental intentions broadly while we developed and refined an intention measure specific to climate change for Studies 2–4 The behaviors we focused on as our main outcome variables were information sharing We measured information sharing through intentions to post on social media We measured climate activism through intentions to support or participate in climate movements and organizations as well as through donations to such organizations (Study 4) Information seeking was assessed through intentions to find out more and greenhouse-gas-intensive food demand were assessed through intentions for impactful actions Future studies should thus either increase the number of participants per study or increase the sensitivity of the measures These barriers are exacerbated by the existence of strong countervailing habits a complete model of attitude and behavior change through media has to take into account the social reverberations of the media content and the new ideas it inspires Kama muta is evoked by compassion (Zickfeld et al., 2017) and a sense of community during media exposure, and it is an emotion that people want to share with others (Fiske et al., 2019) While just sharing the emotion might not lead to any measurable action in the short term especially with a clear connection to a mitigation path should lead to a community-level behavior change through changed social norms Future research should test this extended model and future research should employ such measures not only intention but also effort as another important aspect of motivation can be assessed as a function of kama muta while minimizing the influence of other determinants of action we chose to control for climate attitudes rather than environmental values some of the items in the CCAS that we employed to measure climate attitudes in Studies 1–4 relate to values such as “Knowing about environmental problems and issues is important to me.” We found no consistent moderation effect for these control variables on the relation between kama muta and intention future studies could experimentally manipulate pro-environmental values to see whether they increase feelings of kama muta we mainly recorded participants’ self-reported appraisal sensations and feelings of kama muta to the specific stimuli but did not assess more general affective attitudes of kama muta the use of repeated exposure to emotional stimuli might strengthen the effect on intentions over time Our effect size across the three studies was considerably small (d = 0.04) and repeated exposure and a focus on general affective attitudes could potentially increase this effect we observed in Studies 2 and 4 that participants high in trait empathic concern reported higher intentions to do something about climate change we only found a small interaction effect in Study 4 by trait empathic concern Another reason can be the presence of a suppression effect, which is an unmeasured effect from the manipulation of the outcome through a mediator variable with the opposite sign of the measured effect (MacKinnon et al., 2000) This interpretation is corroborated by the finding that the direct effect of condition on intentions (and on reading time in Study 2) became negative when controlling for experienced kama muta This could have had a larger effect on some aspects of the attitude component Future research should use a broader array of media messages and measure more predictors of intention we ran additional analyses to test whether other emotions evoked by the media messages would also predict intentions and behavior when all assessed emotions all emotion concepts measured had significant positive zero-order correlations with intentions The largest correlations were found for climate attitudes (except in Study 4 where kama muta and prior attitudes predicted to a similar extent) sadness never predicted intentions significantly independent associations with intentions in Studies 2 and 4 but not in 1 and 3 and it had a small independent correlation with intentions as well we found in addition that sadness predicted reading time positively in the multiple regression and kama muta negatively in the multiple regression Hope and climate attitudes were the only variables predicting donations in the multiple regression The patterns regarding intentions are similar across studies and largely consistent with hypotheses The patterns for the behavioral outcomes are somewhat inconsistent and puzzling while the meta-analytic association of kama muta with reading time is positive and significant the association of kama muta with reading time became significantly negative when controlling for prior attitudes and other emotions in Study 4 They found a parallel path from injustice perceptions through anger on intentions Collective efficacy is closely related to hope, in that it is about the belief that the movement together can bring about change (Braithwaite, 2004) Kama muta without hope is thus unlikely to lead to action and collectively shared type of hope gives rise to kama muta which becomes a motivator for continued activism Our studies were not specifically designed to test such a model the independent effects of anger and hope with motivations in some of our studies make it worthwhile examining this proposition further by specifying the object of the emotions and testing more complex models such as the mentioned parallel mediation model the compassion and communal sharing with victims of climate change can be one object evoking the emotion potentially more related to information sharing while increased communal sharing with fellow activists (in the simple sense of taking pro-environmental action) is another object evoking the emotion potentially more closely related to motivation for activism The experimental effects on intentions and behavior were rather small and our samples were not adequately powered to detect such effects The meta-analytic approach can somewhat redeem this shortcoming but future studies would need to focus on more valid sample size justifications such as selecting the smallest effect of interest we found an association between kama muta evoked by media messages and intentions for actions that can contribute to climate change mitigation This effect remained significant when controlling for prior climate change attitudes It was not moderated by prior climate change attitudes meaning that being more moved by the media message predicted more intentions for climate skeptics as well as people seeing climate change as a real and serious problem needing urgent action we compared a more moving to a less moving message yet found only an indirect effect of condition on intention through evoked kama muta We conclude that kama muta could motivate climate action even in persons not highly engaged already before this effect can be used in media campaigns The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found below: https://osf.io/fsb4n/ The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by University of Oslo The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study This research was supported by internal research grants from the Department of Psychology We thank the Kama muta lab for helpful feedback and discussions We thank Aikaterini Karamali for assistance with Study 1 and Daniel Brown for assistance with Study 4 All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1112910/full#supplementary-material 2. ^We recorded clicking behavior in the US sample for only three participants 3. ^Note that this decision was not pre-registered, but considered a sensible addition. Analyses without controlling for country are presented in the Supplementary Tables S3, S4 4. ^Originally, we preregistered excluding participants if they failed an item testing comprehension of the audio clip. However, we realized that the questions were ambiguously worded and observed a high exclusion rate (final N = 165). The main analyses applying this exclusion filter were similar to not excluding these participants and the results can be found in Supplementary Table S7 5. ^By mistake the possibility to participate only for educational purposes was not registered we registered two exclusion criteria that we did not measure systematically: reporting technical problems with the audio and answering the manipulation check question wrong Two participants indicated in the comments that they experienced technical difficulties but they were already excluded by one of the other exclusion criteria 6. ^To decrease the time necessary to take the survey we shortened the attitude measure from Study 2 to use in Study 3 Our goal was to keep most of the intention subscale because we sought to control for prior attitudes relating to the usefulness vs futility of personal action against climate change Based on a reliability analysis of the data from Study 2 we removed two items with an item-total correlation of below 0.60 (CCAS 10 and 15) we removed some near-synonyms from the Belief subscale and 8 (based on inter-correlations with the selected items of over 0.80) four from the Belief subscale and five from the intention subscale 7. ^The study was originally conducted as part of a graduate thesis (Østby, 2018) that focused on climate refugees it included measures not focal to the current purposes but we present them for reasons of transparency 8. ^Note that this prediction is consistent with kama muta theory, and also with the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) where attitudes are the sum of all the relevant beliefs multiplied by the value given to these specific outcomes can increase the value of the expected outcomes of various pro-environmental behaviors by increasing how much a person cares about others 9. ^We had not thought of that confound when choosing the control condition but think in retrospect that this choice of a control video was unfortunate because the video propagated a tool for implementing new habits which at least some of our intention items tapped into Effectiveness and confusion of the time to change anti-stigma campaign A review of intervention studies aimed at household energy conservation CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar Witnessing excellence in action: the “other-praising” emotions of elevation Google Scholar Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar Blom, S. 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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) *Correspondence: Beate Seibt, YmVhdGUuc2VpYnRAcHN5a29sb2dpLnVpby5ubw== †These authors share first authorship Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher 94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or goodLearn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish Install the TJR Wrestling web app for instant access to the very latest news and reviews Bruce Prichard has explained why legendary Japanese star The Great Muta never worked for WWE Despite being inducted into the WWE Hall Of Fame by ‘Nature Boy’ Ric Flair during a star studded ceremony in Los Angeles on 31st March 2023 the former four-time IWGP Heavyweight Champion never competed in a bout in a WWE ring during a storied career that spanned almost 40 years wrestled sporadically for World Championship Wrestling for a decade following his debut in March 1989 from whom he captured the WCW World Television Championship on 3rd September 1989 During a recent edition of his popular podcast, ‘Something To Wrestle‘ WWE Executive Prichard explained why Muta never came close to working for WWE revealing that a lack of interest in Muta’s long term friend and manager Gary Hart had a significant impact on any potential deal: You would’ve had to go through Gary Hart Gary had already been up and had meetings with Vince and Pat Prichard later confirmed that he had met Muta whilst visiting a WCW event in Connecticut in 1989 with fellow WWE stalwart Pat Patterson but revealed that nothing beyond a friendly greeting occured: As well as holding significant responsibility behind the scenes Prichard also made his name as a television character of his own right after portraying the controversial Brother Love persona for three years following his on-screen debut in June 1988 Despite his success in the role, Prichard recently admitted that another broadcasting position was not suited to his talents, revealing that he considered himself the ‘worst play by play commentator’ on Earth’ H/T: WrestlingInc for the above transcription A WWE Hall of Famer has questioned Joe Hendry's loss at WrestleMania A former WWE Superstar has opened up about his participation in the Money In The Bank ladder match AEW star Darby Allin has broken a world record as he continues with his attempt to climb Mount Everest A WWE Hall of Famer who worked with Vince McMahon closely knows what the former boss would have hated at this year's WrestleMania After the latest round of cuts to the WWE roster it seems that one talent was let go due to reasons outside the ring that had them pulled from TV A former WWE Superstar has slammed the company following the recent wave of releases Steve Austin has detailed his reasons for missing the final bout of WrestleMania 41 Rhea Ripley is looking forward to going home Keiji Muto, also known as The Great Muta, has been one of the most revolutionary professional wrestlers for over 30 years. Despite this, the legendary Japanese performer never competed for the WWE. While Muta did find success in WCW, made sporadic appearances in TNA, and most recently appeared at AEW's "Grand Slam Rampage" in September the top wrestling company in North America is absent from his historic resume as an in-ring performer Muta discussed his time competing in America with WCW but kept his feelings regarding his lack of a WWE run brief After competing in WCW sporadically throughout the late '80s and '90s Muta had a long-term tour of the company in 2000 spending most of the summer stateside with the promotion I was ready to return to the American mat," Muta told Hausman plainly the former nWo Japan leader won the WCW World Tag Team Championships before returning to Japan at the end of the year The question of whether or not WWE was ever an option for Muto was left unanswered but when asked how he feels about never competing in the juggernaut company "I just don't understand this," Muta admitted "[WWE]'s way of thinking was so different at that time." Volume 12 - 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648448 We found that (1) social connection and kama muta were related and predicted by empathic concern (2) live concerts produced more social connection and (3) the salience of the coronavirus during concerts predicted kama muta and this effect was completely mediated by social connection Exploratory analyses also examined the influence of social and physical presence This research contributes to the understanding of how people can connect socially and emotionally in virtual environments “In today’s world of fear and unease and social distancing […] I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life. But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to […] We need moments that reassure us that we are not alone” (Grohl, 2020) Musicians responded rapidly to governments’ social distancing restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic by providing streamed concerts These streamed concerts seemed to provide a sense of comfort and connection during the uncertain and challenging times the elements that facilitate the sense of connection and closeness remain unexplored We aimed to examine a variety of concert characteristics and personal traits to understand what elements of virtual concerts facilitate social connection in concert viewers The distinction between live and pre-recorded music may be less clear in the virtual concert environment because streaming platforms such as YouTube and Facebook have introduced features such as the “Live chat replay” where even after a concert has been livestreamed viewers can see comments appear as they would have in the livestreamed concert Features like this may create feelings of being in the presence of others even while watching alone we collected information not only on whether a concert was livestreamed or pre-recorded but also on whether it was a live-streamed concert being viewed in real time or after the concert was aired Certain genres may be better suited to the livestream context than others it may be easier for musicians in certain genres to create a virtual auditory experience that is more similar to a real live concert than it would be for others due to the constraints of requiring the appropriate sound equipment electronic dance music producers who rely only on their computers may have been able to master the virtual stage faster than musicians in other genres we predicted that audience members’ perceptions of the salience of the coronavirus during the concert (for example if they noticed performers or audience members discuss the topic or encourage donations) would increase their sense of social connection during a virtual concert A collective awareness and discussion of the pandemic may thus evoke kama muta through the solidarity evoked by a common fate through the comfort of sharing a beautiful experience amidst a crisis and through emotional contagion of others’ kama muta we predicted that the more the pandemic was made salient during a concert the more connected people would feel and this in turn would increase their kama muta responses we hypothesized that connectedness would mediate the effect of coronavirus salience on kama muta This suggests that empathic concern may also be related to enhanced motor resonance in the context of music listening (2) livestreamed concerts would lead to more social connection and kama muta than pre-recorded concerts and (3) greater salience of the coronavirus pandemic would facilitate social connection which would mediate the effect on kama muta Participants were recruited to participate in a research project titled “Quarantine Concerts” though participants were not necessarily in quarantine The participants were invited to take a survey if they had recently watched at least 15 minutes of a virtual concert and they were encouraged to watch a concert of their choice if they had not recently done so The concerts that participants watched could have occurred before the coronavirus pandemic or they could have occurred during the pandemic; however all concert viewing took place during the worldwide coronavirus pandemic Participants were encouraged to think about their last online concert experience when they responded to the questions and thus responses were retrospective This study was approved by the ethics committee of the University of Oslo’s Department of Psychology All participants gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki 661 people clicked on the link to participate in the research and provided consent to participate participants were first asked if they had recently watched a concert for more than 15 minutes If they responded “No” they were advised that it is important that they have adequate experience with online concerts and to spend at least 15 minutes watching an online concert of their choice before answering the survey After excluding for not having watched >15 minutes of a concert (n = 124 who responded “No” to the first question n = 7 who filled the survey but reported spending less than 15 min watching a concert) or not completing the social connection and kama muta items (n = 205) the final sample size was n = 307 (Woman: n = 156 n = 158 a live-streamed concert when it was aired and n = 65 a live-streamed concert after it had been aired forming the three levels of our main variable concert type Participants reported on their appraisal of the concert by reporting whether the experience in the virtual concert seemed similar to their experiences in a real concert and whether they thought the concert was good (not at all vs extremely; labeled concert quality hereafter) Participants reported whether they practice music and the number of months of musical training they have received One important concert characteristic was the salience of the coronavirus crisis This could vary because participants could have watched concert videos filmed before or during the coronavirus pandemic because the pandemic and the infection control measures had milder and more severe phases in the different regions examined or audiences could engage with the topic to various extents We measured coronavirus salience with a single item that asked: “How salient were the coronavirus-induced social distancing circumstances (e.g. did the performer or audience members discuss the topic or encourage donations) 1 (Not at all salient) – 5 (Very Salient)” Translations of this question used words that more closely approximated “prominent” which is a synonym of salient instead of the kama muta scale having a response scale from 0 (Not at all) to 6 (A lot) as per its original design it had response options of 1 (Not at all) to 6 (A lot) The behaviors dimension contained items that gathered how much participants engaged in interactions surrounding the concert by reading Responses were pre-processed and analyzed in R (v4.0.2, 2020) and RStudio (v1.0.153, 2016). Free text responses were translated into English with assistance from native speakers (Spanish, Norwegian) and with assistance from Google Translate (German). Details on pre-processing can be found in Supplementary 2 Alpha was used as a measure of reliability for several scales Reliability was reasonable across the 10 social connection items (alpha = 0.81) and the 11 kama muta scale items (alpha = 0.87) therefore the values were averaged to create separate measures of social connection and kama muta Measures reflecting potential effects of the pandemic on mental health (loneliness and anxiety) demonstrated reasonable reliability as well (alpha = 0.84) therefore they were averaged and are referred to in the results as “loneliness.” The social media platform was determined from the URL or participant reports Participants’ free text responses reporting the concert setting were re-coded to the categories of home participants’ reported genres were re-coded into the most popular categories present in participants’ responses: African-American (consists of Soul/RandB/Funk Participants’ estimates of the size of the audience were manually re-coded to provide a numeric estimate of audience size A principal component analysis revealed that re-wording the multimodal presence scale to make it relevant to the virtual concert environment caused a different loading structure such that one item from the social presence subscale was more relevant for the physical presence dimension If participants watched a concert that occurred in the same country where participants were residing this was identified as a shared country between the performer and the participant Country of the participant was also re-coded into a variable “region” that classified whether participants were from Asia Responses to the question “How much of the concert did you watch (minutes)” were manually converted to number of minutes if participants responded with words or in the unit of hours If participants wrote that they had watched the full concert and they provided a link the duration of watching was extracted from the length of the video If people did not provide the link to the concert video or if the concert video was not available these responses were not considered when examining concert viewing duration With regards to the question “How many months of musical training have you received?” participants sometimes responded with words or in the unit of years therefore these were examined and re-coded manually when months could be extracted from participants’ responses If the number of months of musical training could not be extracted from participants’ responses (e.g. “many years”) then these responses were not considered when examining the effect of musical training To assess the effectiveness of the industry and artist collaborations partners’ names were searched in the responses These references may appear in the URL in the case of the industry partnerships and in the name of the artist for the artist partnerships we conducted backward selection approach multiple regressions and Kendall correlations to extensively examine the effect of all concert and personal variables on outcomes such as emotions and presence in addition to the main outcome variables of social connection and kama muta The sample was n = 300 for these analyses because 7 participants did not respond to the empathic concern scale and empathic concern were all correlated [SC × KM: r(298) = 0.60 p < 0.001; EC × SC: r(298) = 0.16 Simple linear regressions were calculated to predict social connection and kama muta based on empathic concern. Empathic concern significantly predicted social connection and kama muta [social connection: β = 0.20, R2 = 0.026, F(1, 298) = 7.99, p = 0.005; kama muta: β = 0.46, R2 = 0.087, F(1, 298) = 28.27, p < 0.001] (see Figure 1) and kama muta with (A) correlations and regression equations of (B) social connection and (C) kama muta A Tukey post-hoc test revealed that livestreamed concerts resulted in more social connection (M = 2.97 SD = 0.84) than pre-recorded concerts (average = 2.50 p < 0.001) and live-streamed concerts watched after they were streamed (M = 2.54 There was no difference in social connection between a pre-recorded concert and a live-streamed concert watched after it had been streamed (p = 0.94) The effect of concert liveness on (A) social connection and (B) kama muta **p < 0.01 and ***p < 0.001 To ensure that this effect was not driven by whether participants were in the presence of others in the same physical space we examined if there were any differences across concert types There was no significant difference between the number of participants viewing with others across concert types [χ2(2) = 3.74 The 95% confidence interval of the indirect effect ranged from 0.06 to 0.16 and therefore was significant (p < 0.001) This result supports our hypothesis that participants would be more moved in concerts where there was more shared awareness of the pandemic because such concert experiences lead to feeling more connected Social connection completely mediates the effect of coronavirus salience on kama muta The diagram displays the average direct effects (0.05) the effect of coronavirus salience on social connection (0.15) and the effect of social connection on kama muta (0.72) We also tested the reverse mediation with kama muta as a mediator for the effect of coronavirus salience on social connection using the same methods described above. The effect of coronavirus salience on social connection was partially mediated by kama muta (see Supplementary Figure 1) The regression coefficient between coronavirus salience and social connection was significant (0.15 The indirect effect was (0.16)∗(0.45) = 0.072 The 95% confidence interval of the indirect effect ranged from 0.04 to 0.11 and was significant (p < 0.001) We collected a large number of variables in the interest of understanding what other variables contribute to the social experience at concerts and in this section we conducted exploratory analyses to investigate how the other variables at concerts predicted the main outcomes Multiple comparison corrections were performed and are described in the following sections Kendall correlations were performed across variables with information on the individual participants’ characteristics (personal importance of music in the past 3 years average loneliness since the beginning of the pandemic the number of other people present in the same space) concert characteristics (how much the performers interacted with the audience and each other the social and physical presence experienced by the participant at the concert participants’ appraisal of if it was similar to a real concert and feelings or behaviors that the participant experienced at the concert (laughing out loud thus the number of others present is not displayed because it had no significant correlations Recall that the correlation between social connection and social presence is partially driven by the fact that these scales share two items The correlation figure reveals that most variables covaried moderately and positively with each other and loneliness had the least relationships with other variables Age had small negative relationships with desire to move and kama muta The relations of personal and concert characteristics with emotional and bodily responses to the concert will be described further below Me = 3.09) differed significantly from Other Website (n = 45 livestreamed concerts viewed in realtime (n = 154 Me = 3.03) differed from livestreamed concerts viewed after they were streamed (n = 67 but that group comprised only 10 participants Significant predictors and effect size estimates for the ANCOVAs in order of descending effect size (partial eta-squared) explaining 1) social connection The model that best described the outcome of kama muta explained 43% of the variance [R2Adjusted = 0.43, F(24, 232) = 9.09, p < 0.001] (see Table 1) and gender as factors and the predictors covid salience empathic concern and how many hours the person typically listens to music per day then platform and then setting failed to reach significance These were therefore eliminated from the model The final model explained 37% of the variance and included the continuous predictors empathic concern fan status and performer interacting with audience in descending order of effect size (partial eta squared) Feelings of physical and social presence may be important contributors to the virtual concert experience We aimed to examine how feelings of presence influence social connection and kama muta and additionally what concert characteristics contribute to feelings of presence we have chosen to explore the influence of presence on social connection and kama muta separately The measure of social connection includes two items from the social presence scale therefore we removed these items from the measure of social connection for the purposes of examining the impact of presence on only the feelings and behaviors in the measure of social connection we fit a simple linear regression to examine the effect of social presence on social connection and social presence explained 27% of the variance in social connection feelings and behaviors [β = 0.43 When physical presence was added as a predictor to the model with social presence 33% of the variance in social connection was explained [social presence: β = 0.31 The effect of (A) social presence on social connection and (B) physical presence on kama muta and their regression equations We further explored the impact of the concert and personal characteristic predictors on social and physical presence to examine what elements of virtual concerts predict feelings of presence. We conducted a backward selection approach to examine which predictors lead to increased presence. The model that best described social presence explained 27% of the variance [R2Adjusted = 0.27, F(21, 241) = 5.69, p < 0.001] (see Table 1) The model selection resulted in a model with genre Loneliness and shared country failed to reach the significance level The final model explained 21% of the variance and contained platform audio quality and attention level in descending order of effect size Simple comparisons between factor levels with at least 20 observations Me = 3.50) produced more social presence than classical genres (n = 41 Me = 3.20) led to more social presence than Other websites (n = 43 only Asia differed significantly from other regions The model that best described physical presence explained 30% of the variance in physical presence [R2Adjusted = 0.30, F(11, 251) = 11.29, p < 0.001] (see Table 1) we retained a model with platform as factor and audio quality with audio quality being the best predictor and empathic concern (33% explained variance) The slopes of the covariates were positive which negatively predicted physical presence Simple comparisons (Bonferroni corrected) revealed that Other websites (n = 42 Me = 2.37) produced significantly less physical presence than YouTube (n = 133 The severity of the coronavirus varied across regions and it was particularly severe in parts of Chile and India during the recruitment phase of this experiment The majority of participants came from Chile and 11 of 12 participants from Asia were based in India therefore it was important to consider that differences in the salience of the coronavirus may be attributable to regional differences Coronavirus salience was highest in Asia (n = 12 a one-way ANOVA indicated that there were no significant differences between regions on the measure of coronavirus salience [F(3 We asked participants to describe how the concert made them feel with a series of emotions. We also asked participants about their embodied sensations and actions such as the extent to which they experienced a desire to move, laughing out loud, and relaxed breathing (1 Not at all – 6 A lot). We conducted Kendall correlations between concert and personal characteristics and outcome variables of emotions and embodied reactions (see Figure 6) Concert and personal characteristics are displayed along the bottom of the correlation matrix while outcomes of feelings and embodied reactions are displayed along the left side Kendall correlations with BH adjustment between concert and personal characteristics (x-axis) and outcomes of emotions and embodied reactions (y-axis) Note that some of the measures within the measure of kama muta are displayed here on the y-axis to show the correlation between specific embodied reactions and the predictor variables (i.e. Many concert and personal characteristics were correlated with embodied reactions and emotions Kama muta was correlated with almost all concert and personal characteristics Participants’ appraisals of the quality of the concert and video and how similar the virtual concert was to a real concert were positively correlated with most feelings and embodied reactions except for feeling tense/anxious and sad/melancholic with perceived concert quality being negatively correlated with feeling tense/anxious the extent to which performers interacted with the audience was correlated with many more variables including social connection Fan-status and the importance of the artist’s music were correlated with both main outcomes and many embodied reactions and positive feelings Loneliness which represents the average frequency that participants felt loneliness and anxiety since the beginning of the pandemic was correlated with feeling kama muta Age was negatively related to feeling kama muta Items related to general music usage and importance were correlated with kama muta Together the results suggest many concert and personal characteristics are related to emotions and embodied reactions We asked people to report why they attended the virtual concerts and examined how their motivations for attendance affected social connection and kama muta. We conducted a multiple regression analysis to examine the effect of the motivation predictors on each outcome variable separately using a backward selection approach (see Figure 7 and Table 2) The model that best described the social connection explained 30% of the variance [R2Adjusted = 0.30 p < 0.001] and contained the predictors that they thought it would be nice with friends and family All predictors had positive slopes except for boredom which negatively predicted social connection The model that best described kama muta explained 32% of the variance [R2Adjusted = 0.32 p < 0.001] and contained the predictors that they liked the artist all predictors had positive slopes except for boredom which negatively predicted kama muta The effect of concert attendance motivations on (A) social connection and (B) kama muta.*p < 0.05 and ∗∗∗p < 0.001 The effect of concert attendance motivations on (A) social connection and (B) kama muta We collected information on whether participants donated to the performers or purchased tickets to the virtual concerts Out of the n = 257 participants used in the models below there were n = 25 participants who donated to the performers n = 15 participants who donated to charity and n = 22 participants who purchased a ticket Significant predictors and effect estimates for the backward selected model explaining donations to the performers Because conducting logistic regression requires that each category contains a response we examined the cross tabulations of the data to ensure that each categorical variable contained at least one person who had donated in each category For the model examining donations to performers no one in the category of livestream viewed after had donated so these participants were re-coded to the pre-recorded concert category (n = 55) we excluded participants from the gender categories of agender or preferred not to say (n = 4) from the genre category of various (n = 3) and from the platform category of TV (n = 1) and Vimeo (n = 1) because no one in these categories donated to performers Region was excluded as a predictor from the analysis because none of the 25 participants from North America donated For the model examining donations to charity from the genre category of various (n = 3) and African-American genres (n = 13) and Zoom (n = 9) because no one in these categories donated Platform: Vimeo was excluded as well because the one participant who used Vimeo had donated to charity therefore there were none who had not donated Region was not included as a predictor again because no participants from Asia donated to charity (n = 10) Setting was also not included as a predictor because no participants who watched a concert with an outdoor setting donated to charity (n = 20) The industry partnerships resulted in 5 recruitments and the artist partnerships resulted in 7 recruitments One of our artist partners promoted through one of the industry partners; therefore one participant was actually recruited through both an artist and industry partner so that the partnerships resulted in a total of 11 participants being recruited We also recruited participants with paid social media advertising through Facebook and Instagram (see Table 4) Social media recruitment costs and outcomes In Table 4 we show how much money was spent on recruitment per country the “reach” which is Facebook’s estimate of the number of people the ad was shown to the number of times people clicked on the link in the advertisement and the number of participants we recruited from each of the countries in which we advertised The total number of participants does not equal the number provided in this table we investigated what predictors caused emotional and embodied reactions what concert attendance motivations led to social connection and kama muta and finally what predictors explained donation behavior these results suggest that organizers and performers can facilitate social connection and kama muta in their audiences by tuning various aspects of their virtual concerts Some social media platforms have begun to introduce features that make livestream replays seem more like they are occurring in realtime such as the “live chat replay” offered in YouTube and Facebook that displays audience members’ comments as they would have appeared during the live concert audience members’ social experiences of livestream replays were not different from pre-recorded concerts there was no effect of concert type on kama muta It is possible that the closeness facilitated in live concerts is simply maintained rather than intensified by any indication of liveness and thus this closeness would not have occurred with the suddenness required to elicit kama muta In related research, the frequency that participants felt lonely since the beginning of the pandemic was correlated with the frequency of viewing livestreams in realtime, but not those viewed after they were aired (Onderdijk et al., 2021) therefore participants may be using live virtual concerts to satisfy their missing social needs Livestreamed concerts may be used strategically in times of social distancing to facilitate social connectedness and mitigate feelings of loneliness and its associated negative health consequences this solidarity through shared hardship is one potential mechanism that could have fostered an intensified connectedness and subsequently kama muta Coronavirus salience was positively correlated with the emotions of being happy/joyful and tender/warm and the embodied reaction of laughing out loud it is additionally possible that the artists and audiences discussed COVID-19 and social distancing in positive Future research could manipulate the extent to which shared narratives are made salient in a concert using different strategies such as through joke telling or by fostering a sense of solidarity to better understand the mechanisms that cause a sudden onset of closeness and the socioemotional reaction of kama muta attention levels were important predictors of social and physical presence perhaps because attention is a prerequisite for feelings of presence and social experiences so concert organizers could aim to capture audiences’ attention and viewers should pay attention to receive the full benefit of virtual concerts Performers may be able to capture audiences’ attentions by interacting with audiences even in the virtual concert environment which will also enhance audience members experiences of social connection and kama muta even using the backward selection procedure coronavirus salience emerged as an important predictor of both social connection and kama muta which means that performers and audiences could foster these emotions by discussing topics of shared struggles There were several variables that predicted social connection Facebook produced more social connection and social presence than YouTube or other websites that were not major social media sites Facebook alerts users when a friend is interested in an event or when another friend is watching the same live event which might foster a sense of togetherness more than seeing other users who are strangers engaging in concerts through the simple live chat function of YouTube both Facebook and YouTube produced more physical presence than other websites Concert organizers could leverage these features of Facebook to facilitate more social connection and presence in their livestreams We examined how concert attendance motivations contributed to the experience of social connection and kama muta Participants who were attending simply from boredom experienced less social connection and kama muta Participants who wanted to feel more connected and who knew the artist personally were more likely to experience social connection and kama muta Doing something nice with friends and family was a unique predictor for the model predicting social connection while unique to kama muta were the motivations of predicted relaxation and enjoyment These results should be interpreted with caution because these motivations were reported retrospectively so it is possible that the concert experience changed their memories of why they initially wanted to attend the concerts together these results suggest that participants’ intentions and predictions can modify the social experience of virtual concerts virtual concerts may not be granted the same generosity it is important to examine the variables that lead to donations and ticket purchasing for virtual concerts To understand ticket purchasing behavior we conducted a backward selection approach to identify predictors that would have led to purchasing tickets before the concert Significant predictors of ticket purchasing behavior were the genres of metal attendance motivations of liking the artist and predicting enjoyment and usual frequency of concerts (before the pandemic) To understand donations to the performers and charities we conducted a similar approach but by including those variables that were measured based on the experience of the concert including their experiences of social connection and kama muta Significant predictors for donations to the performers were if the performer asked for donations for themselves being a livestreamed concert in real time as opposed to a pre-recorded concert using the platform of Facebook as compared to Instagram or another website being in the same country as the performer Significant predictors for donations to charity were if the performer asked for donations to charities livestreamed concert (as compared to pre-recorded) and being on the platform of Facebook as opposed to another website or YouTube Together these results show that to encourage ticket purchasing and other websites and focus on selling tickets to their existing fanbase Participants who attended more concerts before the pandemic likely understood the value of these concerts and therefore did not mind spending money on tickets for virtual concerts it is important that performers actually request them for themselves or for charities Performers have a privileged space in peoples’ lives where audiences are receptive when they advocate for causes or for themselves The liveness of the concert was important in facilitating donations as well either because people feel more accountable or generous when at a live event or because more pre-recorded concerts occurred before the pandemic People who are older likely have more money to donate to performers which explains the positive association with age being lonelier led to less donations to the performer and charities possibly because these individuals were struggling financially themselves or because their lack of social support made it challenging for them to give financial support Sharing a country with the performer may have made it easier to donate because of shared banking systems and currency Facebook introduced the software infrastructure allowing audience members to easily donate to charities and to performers directly within their platform More laughing out loud and lower audio quality were also predictors of donations to charities; however these predictors are more challenging to interpret Laughter was correlated with fan-status (0.22) coronavirus salience (0.24) and performer interaction with the audience (0.39) therefore it is possible that when a loved performer interacted with the audience perhaps by encouraging donations with some joking about the coronavirus this could have made participants laugh out loud and inspire donations to charity The finding that higher audio quality predicted less donations to charity is peculiar especially given that audio quality was found to be a predictor of social connection and kama muta It is possible that the higher quality made participants experience more physical presence and thus helped them forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the importance of donating it could be that if people are going to donate they choose between donating to the performer or charities and if the audio quality is poor they are more likely to donate to a charity than the performer Future research should aim to test these exploratory findings directly While we made great efforts to sample from different regions and concert types our final sample is certainly not representative of any region or of the totality of virtual concerts This is a limitation when it comes to interpreting regional differences while the mediation effect for our third hypothesis is consistent with our expectations we cannot establish causality in a cross-sectional study We reported a large number of tests which greatly increases the risk of a type I error and thus especially the exploratory results should be interpreted with caution to effectively explore the data we conducted regressions with stepwise approaches combined with theoretical knowledge of the predictors we recognize that future research should aim to experimentally manipulate and test the effects of variables that predict social connection and kama muta from this study re-coding of genre and setting relied heavily on experimenter’s judgments It is possible that some of the coding of genres and settings may have resulted in incorrect classification We recognize that there are artists who may cross several genre categories; therefore the analysis with genre should be interpreted carefully We additionally wish to recognize that these genre classifications do not provide a nuanced awareness of the impact of genres and we encourage future researchers to take an experimental approach by directly manipulating musical genre Further reflection on the types of responses we expected could have allowed us to provide closed response options to participants which could have improved survey completion rate and improved validity (for example providing a list of genres and settings that participants could choose from) we now have a richer dataset than we would have had if we had provided forced choice instead of free text response options Other researchers are now able to use this data to ask their own questions a researcher could explore whether religious music or settings facilitated greater social connection and kama muta The detail provided by the free text options will allow researchers to explore this question and more Coronavirus salience was measured with a single item that aimed to measure how much participants were aware of the coronavirus during the concert Examples of whether the performer or audience members mentioned the coronavirus were provided there are other ways in which the participants may have been aware of the coronavirus such as their personal situation (e.g. or if they were worrying about loved ones that our survey did not measure Future work should aim to measure awareness of troublesome situations or should aim to experimentally manipulate participants’ awareness We included all participants who reported recently watching a concert for more than 15 minutes information on how recently they had viewed the concert was not collected We also did not provide a rule for how recently participants needed to have watched the concert to be included in the experiment participants’ responses were possibly dependent on the accuracy of their memories Future research could explicitly collect this information or directly manipulate concert experiences to avoid this confound Participants’ responses to the question on the size of the audience indicated that this question was unclear because some responded with information from the audience that was present during the filming of the concert video if their concert video had an audience while we were trying to measure the size of the virtual audience who was simultaneously streaming with participants Future research should consider asking specifically about the number of other people streaming the concert if that information is available or the number of people in the video’s audience depending on what measure they wish to collect Globalization has provided us with many tools to connect with people across the world The same phenomenon that makes it more likely for pandemics to occur also allows researchers to collaborate internationally and recruit larger sample sizes we should also carefully consider the impact that our recruitment methods have not only on the data we collect but also the people we collect from The advertising we used inadvertently caused a bias in the dataset because the advertiser had varied fees across different countries We encourage future researchers to think critically with an intersectional and equitable lens to ensure they are engaging in ethical recruitment We hope that by being transparent with our recruitment methods and their efficacy we are contributing to the mandate of open science We aimed to examine the variables that produce social connection and kama muta in virtual concerts during the coronavirus pandemic (2) live as compared to pre-recorded virtual concerts facilitated more social connection and (3) greater salience of the coronavirus pandemic produced more kama muta and this effect was completely mediated by social connection This research contributes to existing research on the social-relational emotion often called “being moved” by showing the importance of perceived physical presence in evoking kama muta and perceived social presence in evoking social connection in virtual environments These results provide actionable guidance for performers and virtual concert organizers on how they can facilitate social connection and kama muta among their audiences and encourage ticket purchasing and donations The datasets presented in this study can be found in an Open Science Foundation online repository accessible here: https://osf.io/skg7h/ The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Committee DS collected and analyzed the data and conducted statistical analyses DS wrote the majority of the manuscript and JV and NG contributed to the introduction and BS edited and approved the final manuscript All authors contributed to the research and approved the submitted version This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence scheme We would like to acknowledge the important contributions from Melvin Treider and Sandra Ladegast who provided Norwegian and German translations of the survey translated participants’ responses to English and in implementation of the online survey Feedback on the survey design and the research was provided by a number of colleagues at RITMO and in the Kama Muta lab with Thomas Schubert and Alan Fiske providing notable guidance The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648448/full#supplementary-material Supplementary 1 | Questionnaire in (A) English Day-to-day dynamics of 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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) *Correspondence: Dana Swarbrick, ZGFuYS5zd2FyYnJpY2tAaW12LnVpby5ubw==