The Temporal Aspect of Bodily Experiences of Emotions: Where do You Feel The First Sensation?

Abstract

Recently, body maps have increasingly been used to identify patterns in respect of the location of the physical sensations elicited by emotions. However, in addition to understanding how emotions are topographically manifest in the body, it is important to add a temporal aspect to deepen the interoceptive study of emotions. Therefore, the present study sought to explore the first perceived sensation. The study sample comprised a group of mindfulness practitioners (n=34) and a group of non-practitioners (n=64) to analyze if there was any difference in their perceptions of emotion. Participants were instructed to evoke five basic emotions (fear, disgust, anger, sadness, joy), and as soon as they became aware of where they felt the emotions start to emerge, were instructed to interrupt the observation and to indicate the region in a diagram of a human figure. Overall, the groups did not differ in the body regions identified for each emotion. Cochran's Q-test showed that the main regions mentioned were the head and the chest. In the case of disgust, the neck, rather than the chest, along with the lower part of the head were the most cited. The most cited regions corresponded to those identified in other studies of body topography as perceived with the greatest increase in activity in response to emotional stimuli. Regarding interoceptive awareness, the independent t-test verified that the mindfulness group scored significantly higher in all subscales of the Brazilian Portuguese version of the 37-item Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness questionnaire compared to the non-mindfulness group.