The Temporal Aspect of Bodily Experiences of Emotions: Where do You Feel The First Sensation?

Recently, body maps have increasingly been used to identify patterns in respect of the location of the physical sensations elicited by emotions. However, in addition to understanding how emotions are topographically manifest in the body, it is important to add a temporal aspect to deepen the interoceptive study of emotions. Therefore, the present study sought to explore the first perceived sensation. The study sample comprised a group of mindfulness practitioners (n=34) and a group of non-practitioners (n=64) to analyze if there was any difference in their perceptions of emotion. Participants were instructed to evoke five basic emotions (fear, disgust, anger, sadness, joy), and as soon as they became aware of where they felt the emotions start to emerge, were instructed to interrupt the observation and to indicate the region in a diagram of a human figure. Overall, the groups did not differ in the body regions identified for each emotion. Cochran's Q-test showed that the main regions mentioned were the head and the chest. In the case of disgust, the neck, rather than the chest, along with the lower part of the head were the most cited. The most cited regions corresponded to those identified in other studies of body topography as perceived with the greatest increase in activity in response to emotional stimuli. Regarding interoceptive awareness, the independent t-test verified that the mindfulness group scored significantly higher in all subscales of the Brazilian Portuguese version of the 37-item Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness questionnaire compared to the non-mindfulness group.

The Temporal Aspect of Bodily Experiences of Emotions: Where do You Feel The First Sensation?

Recently, body maps have increasingly been used to identify patterns in respect of the location of the physical sensations elicited by emotions. However, in addition to understanding how emotions are topographically manifest in the body, it is important to add a temporal aspect to deepen the interoceptive study of emotions. Therefore, the present study sought to explore the first perceived sensation. The study sample comprised a group of mindfulness practitioners (n=34) and a group of non-practitioners (n=64) to analyze if there was any difference in their perceptions of emotion. Participants were instructed to evoke five basic emotions (fear, disgust, anger, sadness, joy), and as soon as they became aware of where they felt the emotions start to emerge, were instructed to interrupt the observation and to indicate the region in a diagram of a human figure. Overall, the groups did not differ in the body regions identified for each emotion. Cochran's Q-test showed that the main regions mentioned were the head and the chest. In the case of disgust, the neck, rather than the chest, along with the lower part of the head were the most cited. The most cited regions corresponded to those identified in other studies of body topography as perceived with the greatest increase in activity in response to emotional stimuli. Regarding interoceptive awareness, the independent t-test verified that the mindfulness group scored significantly higher in all subscales of the Brazilian Portuguese version of the 37-item Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness questionnaire compared to the non-mindfulness group.

Embodied metaphor in communication about lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China

The study investigated how a group of 27 Wuhan citizens employed metaphors to communicate about their lived experiences of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic through in-depth individual interviews. The analysis of metaphors reflected the different kinds of emotional states and psychological conditions of the research participants, focusing on their mental imagery of COVID-19, extreme emotional experiences, and symbolic behaviors under the pandemic. The results show that multiple metaphors were used to construe emotionally-complex, isolating experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most metaphorical narratives were grounded in embodied sensorimotor experiences such as body parts, battling, hitting, weight, temperature, spatialization, motion, violence, light, and journeys. Embodied metaphors were manifested in both verbal expressions and nonlinguistic behaviors (e.g., patients’ repetitive behaviors). These results suggest that the bodily experiences of the pandemic, the environment, and the psychological factors combine to shape people’s metaphorical thinking processes.

‘Which part of the day is (wo)man o’clock?’: Desires, urges and possibilities of (un)becoming

Drawing on Butler’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising of (un)becoming, we study how male to female crossdressers enact the many fantasies of the crossdresser persona through gendered market objects and rituals to undo gender norms in a body that is at times considered ‘lawful’ and at others ‘unlawful’. We highlight how fantasies participate in the processes of unbecoming and becoming to disrupt the existing gendered boundaries/subjectivities and create new possibilities of being. The market objects, including the mundane and the excess, are operating in the becoming/unbecoming, facilitating temporal gender transformations, while at the same time creating identity residues that persist between the many gendered bodily experiences (male, female or hybrid) permeating time and space. In particular, we highlight how these identity residues can be experienced as pleasurable or risky if not managed carefully, contributing to an enhanced understanding of the affective state of in-between gender and how it intersects with gendered market objects and rituals.

When the Body Knows: Interoceptive Accuracy Enhances Physiological But Not Explicit Differentiation Between Liars and Truth-Tellers

Recent research suggests that people experience distinct physiological reactions to lies versus truths. It is unclear, however, if this experience is incorporated into greater truth-lie judgment accuracy. We hypothesized individuals with high interoceptive accuracy—those with greater access to bodily experiences and stronger physiological responses to emotional stimuli—might be particularly likely to accurately discriminate high-stakes, emotional lies and truths. Participants (n = 71) completed two study sessions: the first assessed their interoceptive accuracy with heartbeat detection measures and the second assessed their deception detection ability while measuring their physiological reactivity. Interoceptive accuracy was associated with a greater difference in vasoconstriction to liars (vs. truth-tellers), suggesting that interoception was positively associated with physiological sensitivity to deception. Interoceptive accuracy, however, was unrelated to deception detection accuracy. While better interoception provides enhanced physiological signals that could better discriminate lies from truths, it does not improve deception detection accuracy.

Training Effects on Affective Perception of Body Movements

What leads us to enjoy watching others’ bodies in motion? In this chapter, the authors discuss their motivation to explore how our bodily experiences, especially in the form of dance training, shape our perceptions and preferences for watching others move, especially in dance contexts. They highlight findings from several studies that they conducted to investigate how general dance experience (or lack thereof) influences our enjoyment of watching dance and how acquiring experience specifically related to the dance piece being observed shapes the pleasure we derive from watching that piece specifically. Overall, our work finds that the richer experience an observer has with learning particular dance movements, the more enjoyment that observer derived from watching those movements. This research underscores the utility of dance as a stimulus and training intervention for addressing key questions relevant to human neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, particularly in the domain of neuroaesthetics.

Variation in embodied metaphors: a contrastive analysis of taste metaphors in Spanish and English

Whereas in the late 90s the universal character of many embodied conceptual metaphors was overemphasised, in the last years some authors have claimed that culture plays a crucial role in the motivation of all kinds of conceptual metaphors, including those grounded on universal bodily experiences. In order to shed some light on this issue, we carry out a contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors with basic tastes as a source domain in Spanish and in English. To this end, we employ a mixed approach, combining data from dictionaries and linguistic corpora. Our analysis reveals that variation is higher at the level of linguistic expression and lower, but still significant, at the conceptual level. Although most taste metaphors are shared by Spanish and English, a few language-specific conceptual metaphors are also found, proving that food culture has an influence on the motivation of conceptual metaphors.

Teaching Fieldwork Experience: Experiment, Embodiment, Emotions

The emotional and sensual dimension of fieldwork, as well as the positionality of the researcher are often debated and considered crucial in anthropology. We assume that “good ethnography” includes sensory and bodily fieldwork experience. But how do we address these issues in teaching? How can we teach students to notice, analyse and make sense of their bodily experiences? How do we encourage the awareness of positionality? What practical steps can we take in designing suitable learning experiences that address these points? In this paper, we share our experience of teaching adapted courses that provide students with fieldwork encounters, where the significance of embodied knowledge can be explored, and their ethnographic awareness cultivated. Basing our analysis on the undergraduate Ethnographic Lab and Ethnographic Methods courses taught at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, we argue that it is important to put students in uncomfortable or unusual fieldwork and teaching situations, forcing them out of their comfort zone so that they experience fieldwork encounters both emotionally and bodily. Recordings of these encounters and the bodily reactions of themselves and others constitute a core part of the data to be gathered, which prevents students from focusing solely on narratives and discourses.

Buddhist Ritual as “Connectionwork”: Aesthetics and Technologies of Mediating Religious Belonging

In September 2016, the Himalayan Buddhist festival Naropa 2016 took place in the Northwest Himalayan region of Ladakh, India. This article analyzes the spectacular aesthetics of the Naro Gyen Druk ritual, the focus of Naropa 2016. Drawing on ethnographic documentation of this ritual, I consider the role of ritual aesthetics in provoking affective, emotional, and bodily experiences among participants and their felt connections to the 12th Gyalwang Drukpa, the charismatic leader of the Drukpa Kagyü organization. I introduce the term “connectionwork” to emphasize how Buddhist conceptualizations of connections, drelwa (‘brel ba), bring to light how ritual and performances of charisma either work or fail to work in establishing religious belonging among Himalayan and international participants. Connectionwork helps to emphasize not only the work to organize and orchestrate religious rituals with the intention to institute religious belonging, but also the agential role that participants play in charismatic ritual performances.