The Item of Clothing That Can Help People Feel Less Angry (M)
A slightly bizarre study had researchers walking up and down a beach on a sunny day.
Category: Emotion
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The Emotion That Activates The Whole Body
The results showed that people felt emotions in all different parts of their bodies.
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).
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How To Overcome Embarrassment
People were asked about embarrassing situations like farting in a yoga class or getting tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
People were asked about embarrassing situations like farting in a yoga class or getting tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Mental training can help overcome embarrassment.
Training the mind to be an observer rather than participating in the situation reduces feelings of distress and humiliation.
People sometimes go to great lengths to avoid embarrassing situations, said Dr Li Jiang, who led the study:
“Embarrassment prevents us from asking advice about what we should do, for example, about our mounting mortgage bills or unplanned pregnancies.
In many cases, if we are to help ourselves, and others, we must overcome our fear of embarrassment in social situations.”
Across three studies people were asked about a series of embarrassing situations: farting in a yoga class or on a date and getting tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Self-conscious people were more likely to take a first-person point of view when thinking of these situations.
In other words, they imagined it happening to them.
However, when they imagined themselves observing the situation from the outside, it reduced their distress.
The study was conducted in the context of marketing products for embarrassing conditions.
Dr Jiang explained:
“Our research shows that devising strategies to successfully reduce embarrassment avoidance is complicated.
This is because consumers will react differently to persuasion tactics depending on their level of public self-consciousness and their amount of available cognitive resources,
Dr Jiang said:
“Embarrassment-avoidance forms the basis for attempts to motivate consumers to buy a wide variety of products, from laundry detergents that can resolve rings around someone’s collar, to dishwasher liquid that can remove unsightly spots on dishes.
Our research is relevant to those situations in which marketers want to inoculate consumers against a fear of embarrassment and encourage them to take actions they might otherwise avoid.”
The study was published in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Jiang et al., 2018).
The Surprising Mood That Makes You More Analytical & Detail-Oriented (M)
One more example that emotions do not just change how you feel — they change how you think.
