Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science and Brain Research Unit, O. V. Lounasmaa Laboratory, School of Science, Aalto University, FI-00076, Espoo, Finland.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jan 14;111(2):646-51. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1321664111. Epub 2013 Dec 30.
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 (n = 701) 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 statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emotions. We propose that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.
情绪通常在身体中感受到，有人提出躯体感觉反馈可以触发有意识的情绪体验。在这里，我们使用独特的地形自我报告方法揭示了与不同情绪相关的身体感觉图谱。在五个实验中，参与者（n=701）观看了两个身体轮廓以及情绪词、故事、电影或面部表情。他们被要求在观看每个刺激时，为他们感觉到活动增加或减少的身体区域上色。不同的情绪在实验中始终与可分离的统计身体感觉图谱相关。这些图谱在西欧和东亚样本中是一致的。统计分类器准确地区分了特定于情绪的激活图谱，证实了情绪之间的地形独立性。我们提出，情绪在躯体感觉系统中被表示为文化上普遍的分类躯体感觉图谱。对这些情绪引发的身体变化的感知可能在产生有意识的情绪感受中发挥关键作用。
