Bodily maps of emotions

Abstract

Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) 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. 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. We propose that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.embodiment | feelings | somatosensation W e often experience emotions directly in the body. When strolling through the park to meet with our sweetheart we walk lightly with our hearts pounding with excitement, whereas anxiety might tighten our muscles and make our hands sweat and tremble before an important job interview. Numerous studies have established that emotion systems prepare us to meet challenges encountered in the environment by adjusting the activation of the cardiovascular, skeletomuscular, neuroendocrine, and autonomic nervous system (ANS) (1). This link between emotions and bodily states is also reflected in the way we speak of emotions (2): a young bride getting married next week may suddenly have "cold feet," severely disappointed lovers may be "heartbroken," and our favorite song may send "a shiver down our spine." Both classic (3) and more recent (4, 5) models of emotional processing assume that subjective emotional feelings are triggered by the perception of emotion-related bodily states that reflect changes in the skeletomuscular, neuroendocrine, and autonomic nervous systems (1). These conscious feelings help the individuals to voluntarily fine-tune their behavior to better match the challenges of the environment (6). Although emotions are associated with a broad range of physiological changes (1, 7), it is still hotly debated whether the bodily changes associated with different emotions are specific enough to serve as the basis for discrete emotional feelings, such as anger, fear, or happiness (8, 9), and the topographical distribution of the emotion-related bodily sensations has remained unknown.Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique computer-based, topographical self-report method (emBODY, Fig. 1). Participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions, and they were asked to color the bodily regions...

Topography of social touching depends on emotional bonds between humans

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