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Bodily maps of emotions

  1. Jari K. Hietanend
  1. aDepartment of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science and
  2. bBrain Research Unit, O. V. Lounasmaa Laboratory, School of Science, Aalto University, FI-00076, Espoo, Finland;
  3. cTurku PET Centre, University of Turku, FI-20521, Turku, Finland; and
  4. dHuman Information Processing Laboratory, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere, FI-33014, Tampere, Finland

  1. Contributed by Riitta Hari, November 27, 2013 (sent for review June 11, 2013)

Significance

Emotions coordinate our behavior and physiological states during survival-salient events and pleasurable interactions. Even though we are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving rise to these subjective sensations have remained unresolved. Here we used a topographical self-report tool to reveal that different emotional states are associated with topographically distinct and culturally universal bodily sensations; these sensations could underlie our conscious emotional experiences. Monitoring the topography of emotion-triggered bodily sensations brings forth a unique tool for emotion research and could even provide a biomarker for emotional disorders.

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.

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: lauri.nummenmaa{at}aalto.fi or riitta.hari{at}aalto.fi.

  • Author contributions: L.N., E.G., R.H., and J.K.H. designed research; L.N. and E.G. performed research; L.N. and E.G. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; L.N. and E.G. analyzed data; and L.N., E.G., R.H., and J.K.H. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1321664111/-/DCSupplemental.

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

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