Whether it's a hot flash of anger, butterflies in the stomach or a light-headed rush of joy, we often experience emotions as physical sensations.
This is all due to the interplay between our mental and physical experiences.
If we're feeling anxious during a first date, for example, the fight-or-flight response can kick in, releasing hormones (including adrenaline) that increase heart rate and tense muscles. This can be felt in the body as a tight chest or shakiness.
Both positive and negative emotions can trigger changes in breathing, sweating, skin sensitivity, salivation, blood flow, body temperature, facial tension and even the digestive system.
It's no coincidence that we talk about 'gut feelings' and 'gut-wrenching anxiety'. These physiological changes can often affect our emotions – a constant feedback loop between the body and the mind.
In 2013, researchers in Finland created 'body maps' of emotions by asking people to match their body parts to different emotional experiences.
Although we all experience our emotions slightly differently, it turns out there are lots of similarities in where we feel them. Anger, for example, is often experienced in the chest and hands, while happiness is felt strongly in the chest and face.
However, the way we think about emotions in the body may have changed over time.
A follow-up study in 2024 mapped the emotions of people living around 3,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (within modern-day Iraq), analysing one million words from ancient texts to find links between emotional expressions and references to body parts.
The researchers found some similarities with present-day humans. Pride, for instance, was linked by Mesopotamians to the heart, as it often is today. But intriguingly, happiness was most associated with the liver, and anger was linked to the legs.
These differences may be due to Mesopotamian cultural beliefs about the body. The liver was thought to be the central organ of the body and location of the soul, which could explain why it was associated with joyous feelings.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Elise Vaughn, Sheffield) 'Why do we feel emotions in different parts of our bodies?'
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