On a beautiful day in early summer, four friends and I decided to picnic and paint in the park. We brought along small squares of watercolour paper split into quadrants, sat in a circle, and took turns painting how we saw each other. These depictions could be abstract or literal: one person did colour swatches of how they interpreted your aura, another person painted objects representing your hobbies and passions. At the end, I got my paper back with four painted interpretations of myself, each done by a different friend.

As I looked at these artistic renderings and considered the close attention my friends had paid me to complete them, I felt a warm swell of emotion and got a little choked up. In that moment, I couldn’t quite define the feeling. It wasn’t exactly joy, nor was it appreciation or pride, but something else. Later, I found the answer in a psychology research paper: it was kama muta.

About a decade ago, the anthropologist Alan Fiske saw a gap in the English language. There was no general term for the emotion of being moved or touched by moments of sharing and connection – such as when you hold a baby for the first time, listen to a loved one’s eulogy, or feel profoundly linked to others at a religious or social gathering. Moments like these can produce a warm and fuzzy feeling, sometimes accompanied by tearing up, getting choked up, or the urge to go ‘aww’. Fiske and his colleagues labelled it kama muta, derived from a Sanskrit term that means ‘moved by love’. Experiencing this positive emotional response, they argue, helps to motivate continued engagement in the relationships that spark it.

For me, knowing about the power of kama muta is a useful nudge toward greater bonding in my relationships. Now I look for opportunities to cultivate it where I can, as my friends and I did that day in the park – sharing care and attention so freely that it moved us.

Is there more than one kind of curiosity? I found myself reflecting on this after reading a recent study about different curiosity styles. An analysis of 483,000 Wikipedia users found that people pursue their curiosity in three ways. Some browse articles as ‘hunters’, targeting ‘specific answers in a projectile path’, and their interests are more likely to be in science and technology. Others are nomadic ‘busybodies’, who explore more, building broad, loose networks of knowledge; they gravitate toward arts, culture and the humanities.

A third group are the ‘dancers’ – a little harder to define, they tend to leap ‘in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge’, taking an unstructured and inventive approach to information-seeking, across radically different subjects.

This made me wonder what kind of curious I am. When I’m reporting as a science journalist, I tend to adopt the ‘hunter’ style. This helps me meet deadlines, but am I missing out on the serendipity of discovering knowledge like the busybody or the dancer? I’d like to believe I’m curious about the world, but realising that other people’s curiosity might be more nomadic or creative gives me pause.

Another downside to the hunter style is that it’s associated with what’s called ‘deprivation curiosity’. This is the desire to banish the discomforts of uncertainty and lack of knowledge. It can lead people to accept easy answers or false facts. It also correlates with overconfidence in one’s worldview, and lower wellbeing. I hope I’m not motivated by deprivation curiosity when I’m hunting knowledge, but I can’t guarantee that’s always true.

The psychologist William James described curiosity as ‘the impulse towards better cognition’. If I take his words and the Wikipedia study to heart, perhaps I ought to be more curious about my curiosity.