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Bodily maps of emotions
- aw3c2 13y agoIn case you are wondering where the download link is: You probably browse with Javascript disabled. The website hides it by default. Here is a direct (wgetable) link: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/12/26/1321664111.full.pdf?with-ds=yes http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/12/26/1321664111.full...
- trothoun 13y agoShame appears to be the spiderman emotion. Interesting.
- dgreensp 13y agoIncredible! This is great.
- wtbob 13y agoThat's really cool, and each of those pictures makes sense. Anger, for example, looks like turning on the brain and arms in order to strike; disgust is the gut and mouth trying to retch; happiness is mostly in one's head; depression is a void; pride is a bursting chest and so forth.
- hosh 13y agoYou can actually bring these emotions to any part of the body, and train to adjust the intensity and clarity of these emotions. There's one bit about the happiness: it might be mostly in one's head, but it covers the whole body. Happiness is related to contentedness, that feeling that you don't need to go anywhere and you're good right here. If happiness did not cover a part of the body, then usually, that part will start agitating for attention. You are no longer content.
- Sprint 13y agoThis is very interesting, thanks! The warm-dark color scales have a slight emphasis on the warmer colors though. They are not exactly of same lightness.
- orasis 13y agoCool hack: You can re-create these emotions by hacking the body sensations. Neuronal connections are bi-directional ("Neurons that fire together wire together"), so if you want to experience happiness, focus on feeling sensation all over the body just like the emotions maps. A really easy (though not necessarily fun) one to try is disgust. Right now, just focus on the sensations in your neck. If you have any body awareness you should feel some yuckiness there. If you are unable to feel it, you may be a habitually hyper head-oriented person and may be totally disconnected from your emotional body. If this the case, I highly recommend learning to meditate to fix the issue. For larger body sensations like happiness, just focusing your attention may not be enough though since your concentration may not be high enough and will naturally flit around. So in addition to focusing attention, move those parts of the body to generate sensation.
- cstavish 13y agoI wonder to what extent the results of such experiments would be due to the power of suggestion.
- hosh 13y agoSuggestion work precisely because people parse the suggestion into these body sensations.
- orasis 13y agoFrom my substantial subjective experience with Vipassana meditation I have found the correlations very strong. When doing Vipassana, especially the form called "Mahasi Noting", attention will "randomly" move around during the session. At various points you might have spontaneous thoughts of fear or disgust. Without any scripting it will be apparent that the body energy changed which caused the emotions associated with those body areas to arise. It's really really weird to be blissed out one second and experiencing existential fear the next, but that's what happens.
- hosh 13y agoAnd sometimes the bliss and fear happens at the same time.
- shadowcats 13y agoFascinating stuff. I guess non-mainstream methodologies/frameworks like NLP, chakras and yoga were on to something when they said that emotions have locations in the body.
- thelamset 13y agoBy the way, emotions having a bodily basis and function is absolutely mainstream psychology, I think Darwin wrote about it, William James, Paul Ekman of course... Mindfullness is included in some therapies. Even new agey ideas by likes of Lowen and Reich are often mentioned in academic textbooks.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoPride and Anger are almost identical maps! Also, Happiness, Love and Anxiety. No surprises