Bodily maps of emotions
University of Turku · Turku PET Centre · +3 more institutions
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.…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 39.52
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 44
Authors
4Topics & keywords
- Happiness
- Psychology
- Anger
- Salient
- Cognitive psychology
- Social psychology
- Computer science
- Reduced inequalities