Emotion maps

Language is a great divider. From country to country the exact same little object or thing can be described by a completely different word and rarely will that word be the same in any three countries. Take your humble frog for instance; in Poland it is a “zaba”, in Tibet a “sbal pa”, in Ethiopia an “enkurarit”, in Fiji a “boto”, and in Finnish a “sammako”. It is the same jumpy, goggle-eyed, long-tongued thing yet many words can describe it. Where frogs and elbows fail however, emotions are transcendent and while the words we use to describe emotions may differ, new research reveals that cross-culturally we perceive those emotions in very similar ways.

The new study involved participants from Scandinavia and Taiwan, two very different cultural backgrounds. The experiment involved participants being exposed to words, stories, or movies designed to evoke specific emotions. They were then asked to colour in regions of a body outline where they felt activity was increasing or decreasing as they viewed the stimulus.

What emerged was that across the European and East Asian cultures emotions were consistently assigned to the same parts of the body.

Anger was felt in the head and chest, fear was felt primarily in the chest, disgust in the intestines and head, happiness throughout the whole body but focused in the head and chest, sadness in the chest, surprise in the head and chest, anxiety in the chest, love in the chest and head and lower abdomen, pride in the head and heart, shame in the head especially the cheeks, and envy in the head.

The researchers say that there could be a universal nature to how we feel emotions in our body, which is where language is transcended. The tantalising prospect is that if emotions are somatosensory then the corresponding part of the body may generate the corresponding emotions if properly stimulated. We are a long way from proving that you can generate love by rubbing the lower abdomen…but it will be fun trying.