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Related Concept Videos

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Using Facial Electromyography to Assess Facial Muscle Reactions to Experienced and Observed Affective Touch in Humans
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Bodily maps of emotions.

Lauri Nummenmaa1, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari

  • 1Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science and Brain Research Unit, O. V. Lounasmaa Laboratory, School of Science, Aalto University, FI-00076, Espoo, Finland.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
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Summary

Emotions activate distinct bodily sensation maps, suggesting a universal somatosensory representation of feelings. This research links body feelings to conscious emotional experiences across cultures.

Keywords:
embodimentfeelingssomatosensation

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psychology
  • Somatosensory research

Background:

  • Emotions are often experienced as bodily sensations.
  • Somatosensory feedback is hypothesized to initiate conscious emotional experiences.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To map bodily sensations associated with distinct emotions.
  • To investigate the role of somatosensory feedback in emotional experiences.
  • To determine the cultural universality of emotion-body maps.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a unique topographical self-report method across five experiments with 701 participants.
  • Participants colored body silhouettes to indicate felt bodily changes (increased/decreased activity) in response to emotional stimuli (words, stories, movies, facial expressions).

Main Results:

  • Consistently identified statistically separable bodily sensation maps for different emotions.
  • Demonstrated concordance of these emotion-specific maps across West European and East Asian samples.
  • Statistical classifiers accurately distinguished emotion-specific activation maps, confirming their independence.

Conclusions:

  • Emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal, categorical somatotopic maps.
  • Perception of emotion-triggered bodily changes is crucial for generating consciously felt emotions.