Wondering where you feel emotions in your body?

These heat maps will shed light

on the subject
Posted On 15 Oct 2014By : StanComment: 0
In the past few years many scientists and researchers around the world have been
studying how emotional state and our energetic body cause health or disease. Th
e way we connect emotionally with others or to our overall wellness and wellbein
g may indeed be more relevant than any exercise, medical treatment, supplements
or food.
The physiological sensations we experience, depending on whether we are angry, s
cared or happy, are actually located in different areas of the body. The simples
t example that each one of us has experienced is shame and the felling of our ch
eeks getting warmer and becoming pink or our ears red. That shows that the feelin
g of shame is evoking energy, connected with the facial muscles of our body.
Our emotions coordinate the behavior and the physiological states during pleasur
able interactions or when we get interviewed for a job. Even though we are often
consciously aware, the mechanisms giving rise to these subjective sensations, l
ike happiness and anger, still remain largely unresolved. The first research tha
t has mapped the areas of our body which are experiencing an increase or decreas
e in sensory activity when we experience a particular emotion has been done by a
team of Finnish scientists. This map was compiled following a study of 700 Taiw
anese, Finnish and Swedish volunteers. The resulting map shows that each type of
emotion activates a network of specific areas of the body, distinct from those
activated by other types of emotions. Every type of emotion carries a unique ene
rgy and a different frequency of vibrations in the body. All cells, membranes, t
issues, glands, organs, vibrate in precise way in us and they are all influenced
by our emotions.
Across experiments, different emotions were consistently associated with statist
ically separable bodily sensation maps, which were concordant across West Europe
an and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specifi
c activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emo
tions.
emotionsheatmap
This body map shows the exact location of the energy burst, depending on the emo
tion we are experiencing in the moment. As you may felt, happiness is the most s
ignificant emotion that is forcing our entire body to respond, as the study show
s, and the main areas are the face and the chest. The second strongest emotion w
e experience, daily I hope, is Love and as you can see, three areas are activate
d the chest, the face and the lower abdomen often connected with the butterflies
. On the other side, on disgust, it activates the body areas which are mainly co
ncentrated around the mouth and the throat. Anger is mainly active in the chest
and the lower part of the face, also arms with particular intensity on the hands
.
The body map lists the areas that are home to a decrease in sensory activity, as
well as the areas in which the people experienced increased sensory activity wh
en emotion is felt. Thus, we notice that the emotions with depression have the e
ffect of generating a feeling of decline in sensory activity in the legs and arm
s.
The research show a remarkable consistency in results, suggesting that the mecha
nisms underlying bodily sensations that we perceive when we experience a particu
lar emotion are likely dictated by the energetic patterns and biology rather tha
n the culture.
The researchers proposed that emotions represented in the somatosensory system a

re culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotio

n-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt em
otions.
The participants in the research were first asked to watch video sequences assoc
iated with different emotions and identify parts of their body where they felt a
n increase or decrease of bodily sensations.
They used a topographical, self-report tool, to reveal that different emotional
experiences are associated with topographically distinct and culturally universa
l bodily sensations and that these sensations could underlie conscious emotional
experiences. Monitoring the topography of these bodily sensations brings forth
a special tool for emotion research and could even provide a biomarker for emoti
onal disorders.
This work was published in the journal Proceedings of The National Academy of Sc
iences on December 31, 2013, under the title Bodily maps of emotions
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