FIGURE 8.4 Mapping Emotions in the Body As expressions like “cold feet” or “butterflies in the stomach” reflect, emotions are often associated with physical sensations. Finnish psychologist Lauri Nummenmaa and his colleagues (2014) investigated this phenomenon in a clever study. Participants were shown blank silhouettes of bodies and, in response to emotion-evoking words, images, or films, they were asked to color in the areas of their body where sensations became stronger or weaker. The body maps show regions where activation increased (warm colors) and decreased (cool colors) when each emotion was felt. While the number of participants is not large enough to draw sweeping conclusions, the results do hint that there may be culturally universal associations of specific emotions with specific body areas. Try this exercise yourself the next time you feel or happy or when you experience another strong emotion. Do the “body maps” found in this research agree with your own experience of different emotions?

If you’d like to participate in the experiment, you can try it here: http://becs.aalto.fi/~lnummen/participate.htm

Figure 2 from Nummenmaa et al., Bodily maps of emotions, PNAS 2013; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 646–651. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1321664111