Brain Activity Prolongs Life

Brain Activity Prolongs Life.
Many phrases lay bare how emotions sham the body: Loss makes you feel "heartbroken," you suffer from "butterflies" in the stomach when nervous, and nauseating things make you "sick to your stomach". Now, a new study from Finland suggests connections between emotions and body parts may be prevalent across cultures. The researchers coaxed Finnish, Swedish and Taiwanese participants into tender various emotions and then asked them to link their feelings to body parts. They connected infuriate to the head, chest, arms and hands; disgust to the head, hands and lower chest; self-importance to the upper body; and love to the whole body except the legs.

As for anxiety, participants heavily linked it to the mid-chest. "The most surprising element was the consistency of the ratings, both across individuals and across all the tested wording groups and cultures," said study lead author Lauri Nummenmaa, an deputy professor of cognitive neuroscience at Finland's Aalto University School of Science. However, one US expert, Paul Zak, chairman of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, was unimpressed by the findings.

He discounted the study, saying it was weakly designed, failed to agree how emotions guide and "doesn't examine a thing". But for his part, Nummenmaa said the probe is useful because it sheds light on how emotions and the body are interconnected. "We wanted to understand how the body and the bias work together for generating emotions. By mapping the bodily changes associated with emotions, we also aimed to perceive how different emotions such as disgust or sadness actually govern bodily functions".

For the study, published online Dec 30, 2013 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers showed two silhouettes of bodies to about 700 people. Depending on the experiment, they tried to jolly feelings out of the participants by showing them passionate words, stories, clips from movies and facial expressions. Then the participants colored the silhouettes to reproduce the body areas they felt were fit most or least active. The approximation was to not mention emotions directly to the participants but instead to make them "feel contrastive emotions".

The researchers noted that some of the emotions may cause activity in specific areas of the body. For example, most elementary emotions were linked to sensations in the upper chest, which may have to do with breathing and heart rate. And common people linked all the emotions to the head, suggesting a possible link to brain activity. But Zak said the bookwork failed to consider that people often feel more than one emotion at a time.

Or that a person's own comprehension of feeling can be misleading since the "areas in the brain that process emotions tend to be in general outside of our conscious awareness. It would make more sense to directly measure activity in the body, such as swatting and temperature, to make sure people's perceptions have some basis in reality. Nummenmaa said he expects days research to go in that direction.

How might the current research be useful? Zak is skeptical that it could be, but the ruminate on lead author is hopeful. "Many mental disorders are associated with altered functioning of the temperamental system, so unraveling how emotions coordinate with the minds and bodies of healthy individuals is mighty for developing treatments for such disorders. Next, the researchers want to see if these emotion-body connections change in kinsfolk who are anxious or depressed learn more. "Also, we are interested in how children and adolescents experience their emotions in their bodies".