Positive Psychotherapy as a Means of Research and Development of Emotional Intelligence in the Course of Individual’s Life Fulfillment

The purpose of this article is to present a psychological hermeneutic triangulation model of emotional intelligence in the course of individual’s life fulfillment. In this context, the methodological framework and psychotechnical tools of positive psychotherapy contribute to the explication of the axiological potential of the emotional intelligence in three modes of realization: internal, external and integrative through the bodily sensation and emotional competence and understanding, interpretation and hermeneutic circle mechanisms. Application of positive psychotherapy at the empirical stage of the study has resulted in a training program for the development of emotional intelligence in the areas of individual’s life fulfillment relevant for the participants, as well as through individual consultations. The article presents evidence of the effectiveness of a prolonged formative experiment on the development of emotional intelligence by means of positive psychotherapy, which helped verify the author’s theoretical model. Keywords: emotional intelligence, positive psychotherapy, training, bodily sensation, emotional competence, mode of individual’s life fulfillment

Peripheral and Central Pain Pathways and Pathophysiology

Pain is an unpleasant sensory experience that may be associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Perception of pain includes 3 aspects: sensory-discriminative (intensity and location), cognitive (bodily sensation), and affective-emotional (suffering). Pain is a complex integration of anatomical pathways, including dorsal root ganglion nociceptive neurons, dorsal horn neurons, spinothalamic and spinobulbar pathways, the thalamus, the cortex, and local modulation. Peripheral and central sensitization may occur after tissue injury. This chapter reviews the peripheral and central processing of pain and concludes with a discussion of pain pathophysiology.

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

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.

Bodily ownership and agency sensations in a natural state

Our 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.

Happiness feels light, sadness feels heavy: introducing valence-related bodily sensation maps of emotions

Bodily sensation mapping (BSM) is a recently developed self-report tool for the assessment of emotions in which people draw their sensations of activation in a body silhouette. Following the circumplex model of affect, activity and valence are the underling dimensions of every emotional experience. The aim of this study was to introduce the neglected valence dimension in BSM. We found that participants systematically report valence-related sensations of bodily lightness for positive emotions (happiness, love, pride), and sensations of bodily heaviness in response to negative emotions (e.g., anger, fear, sadness, depression) with specific body topography (Experiment 1). Further experiments showed that both computers (using a machine learning approach) and humans recognize emotions better when classification is based on the combined activity- and valence-related BSMs compared to either type of BSM alone (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that both types of bodily sensations reflect distinct parts of emotion knowledge. Importantly, participants found it clearer to indicate their bodily sensations induced by sadness and depression in terms of bodily weight than bodily activity (Experiment 2 and 4), suggesting that the added value of valence-related BSMs is particularly relevant for the assessment of emotions at the negative end of the valence spectrum.

Enhanced bodily states of fear facilitates bias perception of fearful faces

We investigated whether enhanced interoceptive bodily states of fear would facilitate recognition of the fearful faces. Participants performed an emotional judgment task after a bodily imagery task inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. In the bodily imagery task, participants were instructed to imagine feeling the bodily sensations of two specific somatotopic patterns: a fear-associated bodily sensation (FBS) or a disgust-associated bodily sensation (DBS). They were shown faces expressing various levels of fearfulness and disgust and instructed to classify the facial expression as fear or disgust. We found a stronger bias favoring the “fearful face” under the congruent FBS condition than under the incongruent DBS condition. The brain response to fearful versus intermediate faces increased in the fronto-insular-temporal network under the FBS condition, but not the DBS condition. The fearful face elicited activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and extrastriate body area under the FBS condition relative to the DBS condition. Furthermore, functional connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex/extrastriate body area and the fronto-insular-temporal network was modulated according to the specific bodily sensation. Our findings suggest that somatotopic patterns of bodily sensation provide informative access to the collective visceral state in the fear processing via the fronto-insular-temporal network.

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training examines the development of Somatics as it has been adopted by successive generations of practitioners since its early beginnings in the 1950s. The book elucidates the ways in which Somatics has engaged globally with some of the various locales in which it was developed and practiced, in terms of its relationships both to other dance training programs in that region and to larger aesthetic and political values. The book thereby offers a cogent analysis of how training regimens can inculcate an embodied politics as they guide and shape the experience of bodily sensation, construct forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summon bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, it focuses on how the notion of a natural body was implemented and developed in Somatics pedagogy.