Heatmaps Reveal Where Humans Feel Certain Emotions On The Bodyby Arjun Walia.
http://www.collective-evolution.com/
February 26, 2014
It’s well known that attitudes, emotions and feelings affect our body in a variety of ways. For example, feelings of hopelessness affect the body’s hormone system and change the chemical flows within our brains. Different emotional states act as triggers that impact our biology in a variety of ways. Brain activity changes during different emotional states. The list goes on and on.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science demonstrates that different emotional states trigger different physical sensations on the body. Emotions such as anger, impacted the body in a different area compared to the emotion of fear, disgust, happiness, love, depression, and more. Each individual emotion had it’s own unique part of the body that correlated with it.
The study was conducted at Aalto University by a team of bio-medical engineers. 700 volunteers from Finland, Sweden and Taiwan participated in the study.
“Emotions
are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has
been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal
maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a
unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments,
participants were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional
words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color
the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing
while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently
associated with statically separable bodily sensation maps across
experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East
Asian samples.” (1)
Regardless
of race, gender, different emotional states correlated with the same
part of the body with the majority of participants. Usually when you
have a group as large as 700 people, your going to get pretty reliable
and conclusive results.
“Emotions
adjust not only our mental, but our bodily states. This way they
prepare us to react swiftly to the dangers, but also to the
opportunities such as pleasurable social interactions present in the
environment.”Lauri Nummenmaa, assistant professor in an Aalto University
press release.
This
study is yet another important reminder of how emotions can impact the
body. Do you pay attention to the ways in which emotions affect your
body, health, and others around you? Finding your inner peace is a great
way to improve your health.
How
can we let go of emotions that don’t serve us? Let’s take anger for
example. Imagine that you are carrying a tank of gasoline, and whatever
it is in your external world that upsets you, is the match. These can be
concepts, thoughts, people, etc. All you have to do is empty and let go
of the tank of gasoline, and the matches can’t start a blaze. You are
always in control of your emotions, your reactions are always your
choice. It starts with looking at yourself from an external perspective.
Nobody else is to blame for your different emotional states but
yourself, although it might not always seem that way.
Did
you know that your heart emits electromagnetic fields that change
according to your emotions? That the human heart’s magnetic field can be
measured up to several feet away from the body? That positive emotions
create physiological benefits in your body? That you can boost your
immune system by conjuring positive emotions? That negative emotions can
create a nervous system chaos, but positive emotions do the opposite?
For more information on this, check out the tremendous work that
scientists and researchers are doing at The Instutue of Hearthmath.
Sources:
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