Mind-Body Connections May Be Universal, Study Suggests
New research from Aalto University School of Science in Finland shows that the mind-body connections may be standard across cultures. That is, wherever they are in the world, people would feel ‘butterflies’ in their stomach when they are nervous, ‘heartbroken’ in the verge of loss, or ‘paralysed’ in times of anxiety, depression and contempt.
The study involved around 700 participants from different cultures (Finnish, Swedish and Taiwanese) who were asked to link their feelings to their body parts. To do this, the researchers showed two silhouettes of human body to each subject and asked them to colour the body areas they felt were becoming most or least active when experiencing a range of emotions, from love to sadness, anger, anxiety, pride and so on. To elicit these emotions, the participants were shown emotional words, stories, clips from movies, and facial expressions.
Results showed that anger seemed to activate the head, chest, arms and hands, whilst disgust activated the head, hands and lower body parts; pride, the upper body; love, the whole body except the legs; and anxiety, the mid-chest. Meanwhile, happiness is the only emotion that’s felt all throughout the body.
The researchers noted that some of the emotions may cause activity in specific areas of the body. For example, most basic emotions were linked to sensations in the upper chest, which may have to do with breathing and heart rate. And people linked all the emotions to the head, suggesting a possible link to brain activity.
But US expert Paul Zak, chairman of the Centre for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, was not convinced by the results. He argued that the study failed to consider that people often feel more than one emotion at a time. Or that a person’s own comprehension of emotion can be misleading since the "areas in the brain that process emotions tend to be largely outside of our conscious awareness," He added that it would make more sense to measure sweat and temperature to make sure people’s perceptions have some basis in reality.
Lauri Nummenmaa, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University, said the study is important as it sheds light on how emotions and the body are interconnected.
"We wanted to understand how the body and the mind work together for generating emotions," Nummenmaa said. "By mapping the bodily changes associated with emotions, we also aimed to comprehend how different emotions such as disgust or sadness actually govern bodily functions.” he said.
"Many mental disorders are associated with altered functioning of the emotional system, so unravelling how emotions coordinate with the minds and bodies of healthy individuals is important for developing treatments for such disorders,".
Their findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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