Bodily maps of emotions

A Finnish study in 2013 (Nummenmaa et al. 2013*) allowed building maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions.

701 Finnish, Swedish and Taiwanese Hokkien speaking participants.
5 experiments
2 silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions in order to evaluate how emotions such as happiness, nervousness and anger feel in the body.

Participants colored the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing (WARM COLORS) or decreasing (COOL COLORS) while viewing each stimulus.

Emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments.

See emotions Back to emotion Back home