Bodily maps of emotions

[INTP]

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.

Full article: http://becs.aalto.fi/~lnummen/PDFs/Nummenmaa_et_al_PNAS_2014.pdf

interesting

 

[Derpravity]

I read that one a few years ago. I think it'd be useful to keep in mind if I was going to act or do improv and portray believable body language. The visceral nature of emotions is very interesting.

Also I wonder how strongly those sensations are connected to actual physiological responses, like anger getting your blood pumped and tensing up your upper body ready for a fight, etc., and how much (if at all) they're ever purely psychosomatic sensations.