Subjective emotion and reported body experience

Abstract

In an investigation of the role of body experience in emotion, subjects were asked to indicate where in their bodies they had experienced a particular instance of each of 10 emotions. The instances concerned either recollected emotion occurrences or actual occurrences immediately prior to report. Reports were obtained by asking the subjects to indicate their body experience in schematic drawings of the body that showed a division into 63 sections; for purposes of analysis these 63 sections were combined into 15 body areas. Patterns of experience were obtained by computing the string of frequencies with which the group of subjects had checked each area for each emotion. Patterns of reported body experiences were different for all 10 emotions studied; all but two of the pairwise comparisons were significantly different. Patterns could be readily interpreted. The evidence does not permit one to conclude that they reflect actual body experience; the reports may have reflected schematic representations of body response. The data do, however, permit the conclusion that the information contained in body experience allows distinction among the 10 emotions studied.