The results showed that people felt emotions in all different parts of their bodies.
Happiness is the emotion that fills the whole body with activity.
The finding emerges from research on the different emotions people feel in different parts of their bodies.
Conscious feelings, it seems, stem at least partly from bodily sensations.
For example, people ‘feel’ sadness in both their head and their heart, whereas pleasure and love are felt in both the head and across much of the upper body.
Despair is felt mainly in the heart, but not in the head, while mania, or madness, is felt all in the head but not elsewhere.
Laughter is felt around the mouth and in the belly — hence the ‘belly laugh’.
Anger is felt in the head, chest and hands — probably because it is a motivating emotion, driving us to do something.
Very few experiences are felt purely in the head: among them imagining, reasoning, reading and remembering.
Dr Lauri Nummenmaa, the study’s first author, said:
“These results show that conscious feelings stem from bodily feedback.
Although consciousness emerges due to brain function and we experience our consciousness to be “housed” in the brain, bodily feedback contributes significantly to a wide variety of subjective feelings.”
For the study, 1,026 people took part in an online survey.
They were asked where in their body they felt different emotions, including longing, sympathy, panic, happiness and many more.
The results showed that people felt emotions in all different parts of their body.
The video below shows where people felt a huge variety of emotions:
The study clearly shows that we don’t just think with our brains, but with our whole bodies.
Dr Nummenmaa said:
“Subjective well-being is an important determinant of our prosperity, and pain and negative emotions are intimately linked with multiple somatic and psychological illnesses.
Our findings help to understand how illnesses and bodily states in general influence our subjective well-being. Importantly, they also demonstrate the strong embodiment of cognitive and emotional states.”
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Nummenmaa et al., 2018).
