I was with a friend hanging out in her dorm the other week when the boy who lived across the hall knocked on the door asking if he could borrow some paper towels. Unfortunately, this was the same boy who had asked her to a formal at his frat, and then told her a few days later that he was taking someone else. The second he showed up at the door, I could see her face become flushed and her cheeks become red. I knew that she was embarrassed and angry. This got me thinking about our emotions and the human body. How was I able to know that my friend was embarrassed just because her cheeks were red? Is this because I felt my face get hot and saw my cheeks get red every time I suffered from the same humiliation? There were so many things that I wanted to know, but my overarching question was simple: Do all humans feel emotion the same way in the body?

Luckily, a new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just a few years ago that showed some discoveries about the human body and emotions. Turns out, scientists have known for a long time that common emotions such as anxiousness, shame, or surprise. Researchers from Aalto University in Finland used “a unique topographical self-report method” to gather their data from 701 participants from places like Finland, Sweden, and Taiwan. Having people from different countries was an important strategy — most people would assume that men and women would process emotions in different ways, but it’s also important to understand that different cultures may teach different values, therefore affecting how emotion is shown or processed.

The study went as follows: “In five experiments, participants…were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus.” Each participant colored the first silhouette where they felt activated when experiencing the given emotion, and the second silhouette was colored where the participant felt deactivated. A third figure combined the two to get a full spectrum on one silhouette. An example of how the participants colored in the silhouettes is shown below:

The study shows that all participants painted their silhouettes the same way. However, when they were averaged out, there were significant patterns throughout. The final results, “averaged” results are shown below, with basic emotions, emotions that are more fundamental and automatic, on the top row and nonbasic emotions, ones that are more complex, on the bottom. The hot colors represent parts of the body that were “activated”, and cool colors represented show part of the body that are “deactivated”:

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Surprisingly, the study found consistent results from all different countries and cultures. Feelings like sadness and depression deactivated the legs and arms, while feelings like love and happiness seemed to cover the majority of the body. Pride was focused towards the head and chest area, and shame was felt most strongly in the cheeks (no surprise there).

While I really enjoyed learning about this experiment, I had some concerns along the way, and I even discovered a few ways that I thought the study could improve. What about participants who haven’t recently felt (or have never felt) emotions like depression or anxiety? People could begin to guess about where they feel what, and even just fabricate results. That’s the problem with the self-report method: you’re never totally sure if got the whole truth. There are some problems with that theory, though — what reason would people have to lie about where they feel their emotions? It’s also likely that most people have felt a majority of the emotions on the list provided to them. According to The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, “the term basic can refer to the idea that some emotions are more are more basic or fundamental than others. Closely related to this idea this interpretation is the idea that all emotions are the building blocks of more complex emotions.” With this idea in mind, we can say that if all of the participants have felt the basic emotions on the list, then they most likely have felt at least a mild form of the more complex, or “nonbasic” emotions. No experiment is totally perfect, and while there are ways to rationalize the way the data was collected in this study, the possibility of falsities is a lot greater when the data is self-reported. Maybe comparing the self-reported data to scans of brain activity or a some thermodynamic imagery of the body might have made the study more thorough.

This study also brought some knew questions to light: Were the emotions recorded by the participants evoked by something totally internal and biological, or were there outside forces in play? In an interview with NPR, neuroscientist Antonia Damasio said, “People look at emotions as something in relation to other people…but emotions also have to do with how we deal with the environment — threats and opportunities.” Taking this theory into account, a possibility for a new study could revolve more around who the participants are — comparing the emotional response of someone who suffers from chronic depression to someone who comes from an abusive family or just lost a loved one. By comparing those results, we could fine-tune the study to see if different sources of pain, joy, or envy affects where in the body emotions are felt.

There are still so many things I would have liked to learn about the science behind emotion, and how it links to the body. Even basic questions like “why do we cry when we’re sad?” or “why do we get butterflies in our stomach when we’re nervous?” have a complex explanation behind them. If I learned one thing, though, its this: emotion is a very powerful thing, powerful enough to turn something completely invisible into a physical, recognizable reaction in our own bodies.