Where do people feel emotions in their body? A quantitative implementation of the Emotionally}Vague project

The present paper presents the results of a collaborative project between an artist and two scientists interested in the embodiment of emotion. In the qualitative Emotionally}Vague project participants were asked to draw on a body outline where or how they felt anger, joy, fear, sadness and love. Inspired by the results of the Emotionally}Vague project, a quantitative study was performed to further examine people’s body-emotion associations. For twenty-one emotions participants could choose a location and a possible second location on a body outline to indicate were they felt that emotion. The results demonstrated that emotions differed in where in the body they were felt. Notably, pride, anger, contempt and curiosity were associated with higher positions in the body as compared to pleasure, fear, guilt and disgust. Furthermore, as expected, there was individual variation in body-emotion associations. For all emotions, there was a sub-set of people that reported a body-emotion association not mentioned by another subset of people. These results support a view that emphasizes individual variability in the embodiment of emotional experience. Both scientific and practical applications of the task used to collect this data are discussed.