scholarly journals Applying Bodily Sensation Maps To Art-Elicited Emotions: An Explorative Study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gemma Schino ◽  
Lisa-Maria van Klaveren ◽  
Héctor Gallegos González ◽  
Ralf Cox

Art is known to give rise to a large range of emotions in people. These emotions are associated with bodily sensations felt in various regions of the body and subjective feelings. The current study applies Bodily Sensation Maps (BSMs, Nummenmaa et al., 2014) as a tool to measure art-elicited emotions by charting bodily sensations onto a body map. Through a web survey, 90 participants viewed 36 digital artworks. After each artwork, they were asked (1) to point out the regions of their body in which they felt strong or weak activity, (2) to select, if appropriate, up to two primary emotional words being anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness or surprise, and (3) to rate the intensity of the subjective feeling on a continuous scale. By allowing two primary emotional words for each artwork, participants could report more complex emotions. Results show that BSMs are a resourceful method to investigate simple and complex emotions elicited by art in terms of bodily sensations and subjective feelings. Interestingly, we found that art-elicited emotions were always characterized by increased activity in the head area. This might indicate a cognitive effort which is typically associated with artistic encounters. This study provides novel insights into the nature of art-elicited emotions and how they are experienced in the body, as well as how they are related to emotions in everyday life.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Souta Hidaka ◽  
Kyoshiro Sasaki ◽  
Toshikazu Kawagoe ◽  
Nobuko Asai ◽  
Wataru Teramoto

AbstractOur bodily sensation is a fundamental cue for our self-consciousness. Whereas experimental studies have uncovered characteristics of bodily sensation, these studies investigated bodily sensations through manipulating bodily sensations to be apart from one’s own body and to be assigned to external, body-like objects. In order to capture our bodily sensation as it is, this questionnaire survey study explored the characteristics of bodily sensation using a large population-based sample (N = 580, comprising 20s to 70s age groups) without experimental manipulations. We focused on the sensations of ownership, the feeling of having a body part as one’s own, and agency, the feeling of controlling a body part by oneself, in multiple body parts (the eyes, ears, hands, legs, nose, and mouth). The ownership and agency sensations were positively related to each other in each body part. Interestingly, the agency sensation of the hands and legs had a positive relationship with the ownership sensations of the other body parts. We also found the 60s age group had a unique internal configuration, assessed by the similarity of rating scores, of the body parts for each bodily sensation. Our findings revealed the existence of unique characteristics for bodily sensations in a natural state.


Author(s):  
RR Galimova ◽  
ET Valeeva ◽  
GV Timasheva ◽  
AB Bakirov

Introduction: Production of ethylbenzene and styrene (EBS) is one of the most important stages in organic synthesis. The products have general toxic, hepatotoxic, irritating and narcotic effects on the human body. Severe exposures to EВS can induce pronounced disorders of the central nervous system such as styrene sickness and encephalopathy and of peripheral blood such as leukopenia and lymphocytosis. Materials and methods: We studied homeostasis indices in 376 workers of the main professional groups engaged in the production of EBS including equipment operators, repairmen, and instrumentation and automation fitters. Results: We established an increase in lipid peroxidation by the level of malondialdehyde amid an increase in catalase activity and a decrease in blood retinol and α-tocopherol levels. We also noted an increased activity of indicator enzymes including ALT, AST, GGT, and alkaline phosphatase. Significant changes in lipid metabolism in the form of cholesterolemia, triglyceridemia, a higher atherogenic index, and lower cholesterol of non-atherogenic blood serum lipids demonstrating atherogenic changes in the body were revealed. Conclusions: The earliest prenosological disorders in the body of the examined workers included an impaired hepatic protein synthesis, the development of cytolysis processes and a change in the integrity and functional activity of the liver cell in individuals, an imbalance in the oxidant-antioxidant system, one of the reasons of which was the adverse occupational exposure to hazardous chemicals. An increase in catalase activity is a protective compensatory reaction during the activation of free radical oxidation processes.


2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2019-011816
Author(s):  
Alice Malpass ◽  
Coreen Mcguire ◽  
Jane Macnaughton

Breathlessness is a sensation affecting those living with chronic respiratory disease, obesity, heart disease and anxiety disorders. The Multidimensional Dyspnoea Profile is a respiratory questionnaire which attempts to measure the incommunicable different sensory qualities (and emotional responses) of breathlessness. Drawing on sensorial anthropology we take as our object of study the process of turning sensations into symptoms. We consider how shared cultural templates of ‘what counts as a symptom’ evolve, mediate and feed into the process of bodily sensations becoming a symptom. Our contribution to the field of sensorial anthropology, as an interdisciplinary collaboration between history, anthropology and the medical humanities, is to provide a critique of how biomedicine and cultures of clinical research have measured the multidimensional sensorial aspects of breathlessness. Using cognitive interviews of respiratory questionnaires with participants from the Breathe Easy groups in the UK, we give examples of how the wording used to describe sensations is often at odds with the language those living with breathlessness understand or use. They struggle to comprehend and map their bodily experience of sensations associated with breathlessness to the words on the respiratory questionnaire. We reflect on the alignment between cognitive interviewing as a method and anthropology as a disciplinary approach. We argue biomedicine brings with it a set of cultural assumptions about what it means to measure (and know) the sensorial breathless body in the context of the respiratory clinic (clinical research). We suggest the mismatch between the descriptions (and confusion) of those responding to the respiratory questionnaire items and those selecting the vocabularies in designing it may be symptomatic of a type of historical testimonial epistemic injustice, founded on the prioritisation of clinical expertise over expertise by experience.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Crucianelli ◽  
Yannis Paloyelis ◽  
Lucia Ricciardi ◽  
Paul M Jenkinson ◽  
Aikaterini Fotopoulou

AbstractMultisensory integration processes are fundamental to our sense of self as embodied beings. Bodily illusions, such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI) and the size-weight illusion (SWI), allow us to investigate how the brain resolves conflicting multisensory evidence during perceptual inference in relation to different facets of body representation. In the RHI, synchronous tactile stimulation of a participant’s hidden hand and a visible rubber hand creates illusory bodily ownership; in the SWI, the perceived size of the body can modulate the estimated weight of external objects. According to Bayesian models, such illusions arise as an attempt to explain the causes of multisensory perception and may reflect the attenuation of somatosensory precision, which is required to resolve perceptual hypotheses about conflicting multisensory input. Recent hypotheses propose that the precision or salience of sensorimotor representations is determined by modulators of synaptic gain, like dopamine, acetylcholine and oxytocin. However, these neuromodulatory hypotheses have not been tested in the context of embodied multisensory integration. The present, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossed-over study (N = 41 healthy volunteers) aimed to investigate the effect of intranasal oxytocin (IN-OT) on multisensory integration processes, tested by means of the RHI and the SWI. Results showed that IN-OT enhanced the subjective feeling of ownership in the RHI, only when synchronous tactile stimulation was involved. Furthermore, IN-OT increased the embodied version of the SWI (quantified as weight estimation error). These findings suggest that oxytocin might modulate processes of visuo-tactile multisensory integration by increasing the precision of top-down signals against bottom-up sensory input.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (37) ◽  
pp. 9198-9203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauri Nummenmaa ◽  
Riitta Hari ◽  
Jari K. Hietanen ◽  
Enrico Glerean

Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life. We defined the organization and determinants of a feeling space involving 100 core feelings that ranged from cognitive and affective processes to somatic sensations and common illnesses. The feeling space was determined by a combination of basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis. A total of 1,026 participants took part in online surveys where we assessed (i) for each feeling, the intensity of four hypothesized basic dimensions (mental experience, bodily sensation, emotion, and controllability), (ii) subjectively experienced similarity of the 100 feelings, and (iii) topography of bodily sensations associated with each feeling. Neural similarity between a subset of the feeling states was derived from the NeuroSynth meta-analysis database based on the data from 9,821 brain-imaging studies. All feelings were emotionally valenced and the saliency of bodily sensations correlated with the saliency of mental experiences associated with each feeling. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction revealed five feeling clusters: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive processes, somatic states and illnesses, and homeostatic states. Organization of the feeling space was best explained by basic dimensions of emotional valence, mental experiences, and bodily sensations. Subjectively felt similarity of feelings was associated with basic feeling dimensions and the topography of the corresponding bodily sensations. These findings reveal a map of subjective feelings that are categorical, emotional, and embodied.


Author(s):  
Laura Roche Chapman ◽  
Brooke Hallowell

Purpose: Arousal and cognitive effort are relevant yet often overlooked components of attention during language processing. Pupillometry can be used to provide a psychophysiological index of arousal and cognitive effort. Given that much is unknown regarding the relationship between cognition and language deficits seen in people with aphasia (PWA), pupillometry may be uniquely suited to explore those relationships. The purpose of this study was to examine arousal and the time course of the allocation of cognitive effort related to sentence processing in people with and without aphasia. Method: Nineteen PWA and age- and education-matched control participants listened to relatively easy (subject-relative) and relatively difficult (object-relative) sentences and were required to answer occasional comprehension questions. Tonic and phasic pupillary responses were used to index arousal and the unfolding of cognitive effort, respectively, while sentences were processed. Group differences in tonic and phasic responses were examined. Results: Group differences were observed for both tonic and phasic responses. PWA exhibited greater overall arousal throughout the task compared with controls, as evidenced by larger tonic pupil responses. Controls exhibited more effort (greater phasic responses) for difficult compared with easy sentences; PWA did not. Group differences in phasic responses were apparent during end-of-sentence and postsentence time windows. Conclusions: Results indicate that the attentional state of PWA in this study was not consistently supportive of adequate task engagement. PWA in our sample may have relatively limited attentional capacity or may have challenges with allocating existing capacity in ways that support adequate task engagement and performance. This work adds to the body of evidence supporting the validity of pupillometric tasks for the study of aphasia and contributes to a better understanding of the nature of language deficits in aphasia. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16959376


Author(s):  
Olha P. Shevchuk ◽  
Natalia P. Yaroshchuk

The relevance of the study lies in covering the potential of meditative practices in the educational process. The purpose of the study is to carry out a theoretical analysis and outline the probable forms of integration of mindfulness practices into the educational process on the example of teachers, as well as to create a theoretical model of the influence of mindfulness practices on the teacher’s personality with professional destruction. The study highlights the main theoretical models of understanding mindfulness practices. The most effective and most frequently used techniques of awareness practice are analysed. The main educational centres of mindfulness in Ukraine are highlighted. Theoretical analysis of empirical research of foreign colleagues in the field of positive influence of mindfulness practices on the personality is carried out. The causes of professional destruction of teachers are analysed. The expediency and efficiency of this integration are argued. Among the positive changes due to the use of awareness practices by teachers are: improving the level of concentration and recollection; increasing attention to the needs and emotional states of students; creating emotional balance and preventing burnout; increasing the level of stress resistance; improving the quality of relationships at work and at home; increasing productivity and as a result of academic success; forming openness and readiness for selfdevelopment; development of the level of reflection and skills to regulate one’s emotions; improving the psychological climate in the classroom and maintaining overall psychological well-being; improving the quality of life and increasing the subjective feeling of happiness. The scientific novelty lies in the creation and operationalisation of a theoretical model of the influence of mindfulness practices on the teacher’s personality with professional destruction through the lens of cognitive, emotional, physiological, and behavioural levels. It is established that the practice of awareness is the main skill of presence in everything that happens to us, around and inside, in the body, feelings and thoughts


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 544-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bracha Hadar

This article explores the history of the exclusion/inclusion of the body in group analytic theory and practice. At the same time, it aims to promote the subject of the body in the mind of group analysts. The main thesis of the article is that sitting in a circle, face-to-face, is a radical change in the transition Foulkes made from psychoanalysis to group analysis. The implications of this transition have not been explored, and in many cases, have been denied. The article describes the vicissitudes of relating group analysis to the body from the time of Foulkes and Anthony’s work until today. The article claims that working with the body in the group demands that the conductor gives special attention to his/her own bodily sensations and feelings, while at the same time remaining cognizant of the fact that each of the participants is a person with a physical body in which their painful history is stored, and that they may be dissociated because of that embodied history. The thesis of the article is followed by a clinical example. The article ends with the conclusion that being in touch with one’s own body demands a lot of training.


1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Starobinski

In one of his Cahiers, Paul Valéry has the note. Somatism (heresy of the end of time),Adoration, cult of the machine for living.† Have we come to the end of time? The heresy anticipated by Valéry has almost become the official religion. Everything is related to the body, as if it had just been rediscovered after being long forgotten; body image, body language, body consciousness, liberation of the body are the passwords. Historians, prey to the same infection, have begun inquiring into what previous cultures have done with the body, in way of tattooing, mutilation, celebration all the rituals related to the various bodily functions.2 Past writers from Rabelais to Flaubert are ransacked for evidence, and immediately it becomes apparent that we are far from being the first discoverers of bodily reality. That reality was the first knowledge to enter human understanding: ‘They knew that they were naked’ (Genesis 3.7). From then on, it has impossible to ignore the body.


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