Changes in Bodily Sensation Maps following different mindfulness interventions
Petra Jansen, Antonia Voll, Philipp Hofmann
Open Mind 2025 preprint DOI: 10.17605/osf.io/zpnke (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Key points | The text reviews the view that physical bodily sensation is central to emotion, citing James and Lange's proposal that physical sensation underlies emotional emergence, suggestions that somatosensory feedback can trigger conscious emotional experiences, and prior work indicating that different emotions correlate with statistically separable bodily sensations representable as bodily sensation maps (BSMs). |
Abstract
Theories on sensation of emotions in the body The existence of physical sensation that comes with experiencing an emotion is well investigated (Pace-Schott et al. , 2019). James and Lange already postulated physical sensation as a central element in the emergence of an emotion (James, 1884). It has been suggested that somatosensory feedback can even trigger conscious emotional experiences (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013) and that different emotions correlate with statistically clearly separable bodily sensations which can be represented in bodily sensation maps (BSMs) (Nummenmaa et al. , 2014).
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mechanisms of mindfulness | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness | 2012 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |