Bodily sensations in social scenarios: Where in the body?

Abstract

Bodily states are fundamental to emotions' emergence and are believed to constitute the first step in the chain of events that culminate in emotional awareness. Recent works have shown that distinct topographical maps can be derived to describe how basic and more complex emotions are represented in the body. However, it is still unclear whether these bodily maps can also extend to emotions experienced specifically within social interactions and how these representations relate to basic emotions. To address this issue, we used the emBODY tool to obtain high-resolution bodily maps that describe the body activation and deactivation experienced by healthy participants when presented with social scenarios depicting establishment or loss of social bonds. We observed patterns of activation/deactivation for each single social scenario depending on the valence, but also a common activation of head, chest and deactivation of limbs for positive and negative social scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, we show that these maps are comparable to those obtained when taking the perspective of a third person, suggesting the existence of common body representation of social emotions for the self and other person evaluation. Finally, we showed that maps related to complex social scenarios are strongly correlated with bodily states experienced in basic emotions, suggesting that the patterns of body activation/deactivation observed for social scenarios might arise from a complex interaction of the basic emotions that these experiences elicit.

Fig 1. Representation of a single trial (romantic rejection) as seen from the participant’s perspective.

The specific task instructions are shown centrally on top, whereas the description of the scenario is shown in the center, between the two silhouettes.

Fig 2. BSMs associated with social scenarios.

Left panel: negative scenarios. Right panel: positive scenarios. Top-row: self-perspective. Bottom row: other-person perspective. Regions of increased and decreased activation are depicted together on the same maps, respectively in warm (0 to 8) and cool colors (0 to—8). Maps are thresholded at p<0.05, FDR-corrected. The bar plots represent the intensity for each body part (orange = head, blue = chest, green = abdomen, yellow = arms, violet = legs). Asterisks indicate values that differ from zero (p<0.05, Bonferroni-corrected).

Fig 3. Overlaps of masks computed from negative and positive scenarios for both the ‘self’ and ‘other’ conditions.

Masks included only significantly activated and deactivated pixels. The colormap indicates the number of overlapping significant pixels.

Fig 4. BSMs associated with basic emotions.

Regions of increased and decreased activity are depicted together from warm (0 to 8) to cool colors (0 to -8). Maps are thresholded at p<0.05, FDR-corrected. The bar plots represent the intensity the for each body part (orange = head, blue = chest; green = abdomen, yellow = arms, violet = legs). Black asterisks indicate values that differ from zero (p<0.05, Bonferroni-corrected).

Fig 5. Correlational matrices between social scenarios and basic emotions.

Each panel depicts the correlation matrix of a social scenario with the six basic emotions (x-axis), separately for each body part (y-axis). Positive and negative Spearman’s coefficients are indicated respectively in warm and cool colors. Only significant coefficients are reported (p<0.05, FDR-corrected).

Fig 6. Correlational matrices between pairs of basic emotions.

Each panel depicts the correlation matrix of a basic emotion with all the other basic emotions (x-axis), separately for each body part (y-axis). Positive and negative Spearman’s coefficients are indicated respectively in warm and cool colors. Only significant coefficients are reported (p<0.05, FDR-corrected).