How Our Emotions Can Be Mapped To The Body

When thinking of emotions, we often relate them to the inner workings of our mind, but a new study by Finnish researchers now suggests that different emotional states can be connected to distinct bodily sensations and that "these sensations could underlie our conscious emotional experiences."

The study saw neuroscientist Lauri Nummenmaa of the University of Turku in Finland and a team of researchers conduct several experiments which explored how bodily sensations and human emotions are associated. 

In experiment 1, participants evaluated which bodily regions they typically felt becoming activated or deactivated based on an emotional word. These included six basic (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and seven nonbasic emotions (anxiety, love, depression, contempt, pride, shame, and envy) as well as a neutral state.

In experiment 2, participants rated bodily sensations triggered by reading short stories describing short emotional and nonemotional episodes, while in experiment 3, short 10 second movies evoking discrete emotional states were played to gauge sensations within the body. In the 4th experiment, the stimuli were pictures of basic facial expressions (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral emotional state.

Based on these experiments, Nummenmaa and his team were able to conclude that "emotional feelings are associated with discrete, yet partially overlapping maps of bodily sensations, which could be at the core of the emotional experience." 

The idea that the mind is in charge of our emotions is popular within Western medicine, while Eastern medicine leans more toward emotions being connected to the body. In another study entitled "Understanding Mind-Body Interaction from the Perspective of East Asian Medicine", Korean researchers were also able to identify specific patterns between emotions and corresponding bodily organ systems, with anger connected to the liver, happiness with the heart, thoughtfulness with the heart and spleen, sadness with the heart and lungs, fear with the kidneys and the heart, surprise with the heart and the gallbladder, and anxiety with the heart and the lungs.

The study discusses East Asian perspectives and how a number of recent neuroscience studies "have suggested that there are mutual interactions between bodily responses and emotions in which physical functions trigger emotional experiences and emotional experiences lead to particular spatial patterns of sensation throughout the body."

With old and new evidence, both esoteric and scientific, to support the connection between the body and emotion, this poses the question, what can we do with our bodies to help to regulate emotions, release emotions stored within the body and improve emotional well-being. And here is where breathwork plays a big role.