The Body and Emotion Heat Map

Have you ever actually felt a heart break? Can you recall a time when anger tightened your hands into fists before you decided to clench them? When you catch sight of someone you want, maybe your knees go soft or your stomach does a small flip. These are not metaphors. For decades, researchers have understood that the central nervous system runs the body by releasing chemical signals.

The process works like this. The brain registers something happening, and its task is to prepare the body to respond. It sends out ligands, a type of peptide, which travel through the body. Particular organs and systems carry receptors that match those chemical messages, which is what triggers the right physical reaction. Fear is one of the oldest versions of this. Sense a threat, and the brain floods the system with cortisol, adrenaline, and related hormones so a person can run or fight. That part is straightforward. The harder question is what the brain and body do with the subtler stuff: love, contempt, envy, surprise, the long gray weight of depression.

Lauri Nummenmaa, a psychologist at Aalto University near Helsinki, Finland, found a clear link between what people feel emotionally and where they feel it physically. She and her team gathered 700 volunteers from Finland, Sweden, and Taiwan for a computer-based study in which people reported their own bodily sensations during emotional states.

Each participant received two blank human silhouettes. They were asked to call to mind one of 14 states: anger, fear, a neutral baseline, happiness, anxiety, love, depression, disgust, sadness, surprise, contempt, pride, shame, and envy. Then they colored the silhouettes to match what their bodies did. On one figure they marked where sensation increased, using warm colors. On the other they marked the areas that felt dead or disengaged, using cool ones.

No two people painted identically, yet the patterns that emerged for each emotion lined up to a surprising degree. Love and depression sat at opposite ends: love warmed nearly the entire body, while depression drained it toward emptiness. Anger collected up top, in the head, chest, and arms. Arms, by the way, lit up for almost nothing else. Fear, as you might guess, settled in the chest.

That chest reaction connects to something clinicians already see. People living with depression, which often travels alongside anxiety, frequently describe a pain or pressure in the chest, and chest discomfort can become a chronic symptom of both conditions. The stress response pushes out cortisol and other hormones to force a reaction. Not everyone with depression reports it, which fits the general emptiness the Aalto participants mapped, but for many people fear seems to feed depression and anxiety, and the chest is where it lands. The sensation maps and the full findings appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers think this knowledge is usable. If you can notice a particular sensation in your body, you can tie it back to the emotion driving it, and then do something about it. Antonio Damasio puts emotion in practical terms: it has to do with how we handle the world around us, the threats and the openings. So when an event stirs a feeling whose bodily signature matches depression, a person can reexamine how they read that event, or steer clear of it. The reverse holds too. Recognizing the physical signs of a good feeling gives people a way to lean into the situations that produce them.

Posture turns out to run the same loop in the other direction. Body language can shift the mind, and the mind's shift changes mood. Amy Cuddy, a Harvard Business School professor and psychologist, ran an experiment on exactly this. She had people hold either a high-power pose or a low-power one for two minutes. High-power poses take up space: think Wonder Woman or Superman, or the classic executive sprawl with feet on the desk and hands laced behind the head. Low-power poses shrink the body inward, the way smaller animals fold themselves down near a larger one. Cuddy measured hormone levels in participants' saliva before and after. The differences were real. Holding power produced power.

The body answers the mind, and the mind answers the body. That cuts both ways, which means someone dealing with anxiety, depression, or fear can set off physiological reactions in themselves without meaning to. These are serious conditions, and no one should pretend a pose fixes them or that anyone can flip their mood on command. Still, as the research grows and these methods make their way into therapy, people may find they hold more leverage over their own body and mind than they assumed.

Melissa Lavery, M.S.

References: Does Body Language Shape Who You Are? (NPR, December 13, 2013). Doucleff, M. Mapping Emotions On The Body: Love Makes Us Warm All Over (NPR, December 30, 2013). Gerasimo, P. Emotional Biochemistry (Experience Life, December 1, 2003). WebMD's Symptom Finder: Physical Symptoms of Depression, Chest (May 4, 2013).