Article week 1
Bodily maps of emotions
Introduction Maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a
unique topographical self-report method are revealed in this paper.
Method Participants were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside
emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were
asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or
decreasing while viewing each stimulus.
Results Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically
separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps
were concordant across West European and East Asian samples.
Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps
accurately, confirming independence of topographies across
emotions. Perception of emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a
key role in generating consciously felt emotions.
Behavior Conscious feelings help individuals to voluntarily fine-tune their
behavior to better match the challenges of the environment.
Physiological Although emotions are associated with a broad range of physiological
changes changes, it is still debated whether the bodily changes associated with
different emotions are specific enough to serve as the basis for
discrete emotional feelings.
Experiment 1: Participants reported bodily sensations associated with 6 “basic” and
words. 7 non-basic (“complex”) emotions, as well as a neutral state.
Side note Emotions coordinate our behavior and physiological states during
survival-salient events and pleasurable interactions. Even though we
are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as
anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving rise to these subjective
sensations have remained unresolved. Here we used a topographical
self-report tool to reveal that different emotional states are
associated with topographically distinct and culturally universal bodily
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, sensations; these sensations could underlie our conscious emotional
experiences. Monitoring the topography of emotion-triggered bodily
sensations brings forth a unique tool for emotion research
The emBODY tool.
Participants colored
to initially blank
body regions.
Activation and
deactivation maps
were subsequently
combined.
Bodily topography
of basic (upper) and
non-basic (lower)
emotions
associated with
words.
The body maps show regions whose activation increased (warm
colors) or decreased (cool colors) when feeling each emotion.
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,Experiment 2 and 3: To control for reporting stereotypes of bodily responses associated
stories and movies. with emotions. To control for this, emotions were directly induced in
participants using two of the most powerful emotion induction
techniques: guided mental imagery based on reading short stores
(exp. 2) and viewing of movies (exp. 3). Simulataneously, they were
asked to report their bodily snesations online during the emotion
induction.
Results: BSMs were similar to those obtained in experiment 1 with
emotion words.
Experiment 4: Hypothesis tested: Models of embodied emotion posit that we
emotions in others. understand others’ emotions by simulating them in our own bodies,
meaning that we should be able to construct bodily representations of
others’ somatovisceral states when observing them expressing
specific emotions.
Participants were presented with pictures of six basic facial
expressions without telling them what emotions (if any) the faces
reflected and asking them to color BSMs for the persons shown in the
pictures, rather than the sensations that view the expressions caused
in themselves.
Results: the obtained BSMs were highly consistent with those
elicited by emtional words, stories, and movies.
Experiment 5: If discrete emotional states were associated with distinct patterns of
recognizing experienced bodily sensations, then one would expect that observers
emotions from could also recognize emotions from the BSMs of others.
BSMs.
Participants were presented with BSMs of each basic emotion from
experiment 1 in a paper-and-pencil forced-choice recognition test.
Results: Anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise, and the
neutral state were classified with high accuracy, whereas performance
did not exceed the chance level for fear.
Conclusion We conclude that emotional feelings are associated with discrete, yet
partially overlapping maps of bodily sensations, which could be at the
core of the emotional experience. These results thus support models
assuming that somatosensation and embodiment play critical roles in
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, emotional processing.
Unraveling the subjective bodily sensations associated with human
emotions may help us to better understand mood disorders such as
depression and anxiety, which are accompanied by altered emotional
processing, ANS activity, and somatosensation.
Topographical changes in emotion-triggered sensations in the body
could thus provide a novel biomarker for emotional disorders.
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