Emotions

Investigating the Emotional Process

Emotions are a complex process that involve a series of components:

Contextual: stimulus, situation, culture; Neurophysiological: activation of brain areas and structures, such as the amygdala, for example; Physiological: changes in various bodily systems - respiratory, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, digestive, etc.; Expressive: facial, vocal, and postural expressions; Motivational: goals and action tendency; Functional: preparing the organism for protection, overcoming obstacles, etc.; Behavioral: approach, avoidance, fight, flight etc.; Cognitive: evaluations, interpretations, conceptualizations; Experiential: perceptions of internal sensations, desires, and impulses to act.

Each theory of emotion highlights one or more components as the most central elements of what emotions are, combining them in different ways.

For Damasio (1994), for example, physiological changes are the central component of emotion. He distinguishes between emotions and feelings, with the latter being the subjective experience of internal bodily sensations (interoception) juxtaposed with the identification of the stimulus that triggered them.

For Ekman (2003), facial expression is the primary component used to classify emotions. Barrett (2017) emphasizes the interaction between context, interoception, and concept. Adolphs and Anderson (2018) highlight functional aspects. Frijda defined emotions as states of "action readiness"(1986). Lieberman (2019) considers subjective experience as what truly defines emotion.

Other authors and researchers in the field consider different aspects and relationships. Thus, the various approaches reflect the diversity of perspectives on the fundamental aspects of emotions.

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Method

To conduct the phenomenological investigation of emotions, I position myself in the same way as in the investigation of attention (see the post on attention in the method section - see here).

That is, I lie in the supine position in order to identify the first bodily manifestation that arises as soon as I evoke the emotion and that persists even while the body remains lying at rest.

Subsequently, I observed this in my daily life. These descriptions are a combination of these two moments of observation.

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Descriptions

When I evoke an emotion by imagining a situation or recalling an autobiographical memory, what appears to me is that certain “centers“ in the body are activated and manifest through pleasant or unpleasant sensations, around which an emotional posture tends to organize itself.

However, before this - almost immediately - there is a tension/movement primarily in the throat region, just below the mandible, which repositions itself in a way that transmits tension to these “centers.”

This tension gives rise to a tendency to adopt a certain posture and generates the desire to act in a specific way (an impulse), for example, to protect myself, hide, attack or destroy something, seek support, etc.

Even if this posture and impulse are not expressed, they may be immediately suppressed or masked.

This can happen due to an evaluation of the situation, either cognitively or through the influence of another emotion that inhibits the first, such as in a conflict between emotions arising from distinct evaluations of the same situation.

For example, I may fear doing something and also fear the consequences of not doing it, thereby generating a decision-making impasse, yet the underlying dynamic remains present.

Thus, it seems that the movement in the throat region occurs first, subtly establishing an internal posture that immediately transmits tension to a specific ‘center‘ in the body, around which the emotional posture organizes itself, as previously described.

In a cascade of actions, this tension alters my breathing pattern, changes my heart rate, modulates my voice properties, activates other muscle groups for more effective action, provokes piloerection, alters body temperature, causes sweating, changes skin conductance, and triggers other reactions and sensations.

All of this unfolds rapidly, within a few seconds.

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Studies on Bodily Sensation Maps of Emotions

This activity perceived in the throat region appears to be consistently present in all emotional contexts, as observed by Davey et al. (2021) and de Carvalho et al. (2024 – in preprint), alongside the regions of the head and chest.

However, it tends to appear with less intensity than these other regions when evaluating the bodily sensation maps of emotions generated in the study by Nummenmaa et al. (2014) (Fig.1) and in typical adult groups in subsequent studies (e.g., Hietman et al., 2016; Volynets et al., 2020).

Moreover, in the study by Jung et al. (2017), this throat region is the only one consistently present in all basic emotions when the maps were covaried with interoceptive accuracy (Fig.2), which is the ability to accurately perceive internal bodily sensations and the degree of correlation between this perception and physiological processes.

It is assessed through a task in which participants have to count their heartbeats without external cues while their heart rate are recorded. Subsequently, the participants’ estimates are compared with the physiological data.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Anyway, the description I provided earlier is how I perceive the emotional phenomenon in general. In future posts, I will describe how this process occurs in each specific emotion.

However, my classification of emotions relates more to these sensations than to the well-known classification proposed by Ekman (2003).

For instance, I perceive that there are different ways of experiencing fear (or what is commonly referred to as fear), since we often use the same term to refer to different experiences.

For example, “I am anxious“ can express either excitement (when I look forward to an event and wish for it to happen soon so I can enjoy it) or anxiety (when I wish the event wouldn’t happen at all, or that it would come quickly just so it can be over).

Conversely, we may also use different terms to designate similar experiences that arise under different motives or circumstances (perhaps fear and anxiety).

Or when we refer to a complex emotion, such as envy, what we may actually be feeling is anger, sadness, or another emotion related to the assessment that someone possesses something we consider ourselves more deserving of.

Anger may arise from the evaluation of injustice, while sadness may stem from an assessment of self-failure.

A preview of the relationship between emotions and their bodily centers: My perception of them is as follows:

anger – head; shame – face; disgust – area around the mouth and nose and the lower throat (when it becomes nausea); sadness – chin and upper throat; euphoric happiness– upper chest; anguish (which I perceive as a mix of fear and sadness, or a desperate sadness) – center of the chest; fear – solar plexus; happiness as fullness – no specific center, but rather a bodily harmony; frustration (a mix of sadness and anger) – middle of the throat, among others.

A useful tip for perceiving these sensations is to observe the exact moment when an emotional state changes.

These transition moments seem to be the most crucial for detecting the full range of sensations that arise from them.

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References

Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life. Times Books/Henry Holt and Co.

Damasio, Antonio R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G.P. Putnam.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Adolphs, R., & Anderson, D. J. (2018). The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77b1j

Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge University Press.

Lieberman M. D. (2019). Boo! The consciousness problem in emotion. Cognition & emotion, https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2018.1515726

Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(2), 646–651. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1321664111

Jung, W. M., Ryu, Y., Lee, Y. S., Wallraven, C., & Chae, Y. (2017). Role of interoceptive accuracy in topographical changes in emotion-induced bodily sensations. PloS one, 12(9), e0183211. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183211

Hietanen, J. K., Glerean, E., Hari, R., & Nummenmaa, L. (2016). Bodily maps of emotions across child development. Developmental science, 19(6), 1111–1118. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12389

Volynets, S., Glerean, E., Hietanen, J. K., Hari, R., & Nummenmaa, L. (2020). Bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 20(7), 1127–1136. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000624

Davey, S., Halberstadt, J., & Bell, E. (2021). Where is emotional feeling felt in the body? An integrative review. PloS one, 16(12), e0261685. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261685