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Anger boils in the gut but not the heart: Decoding the bodily location of emotional feelings from language
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Hyoungsun Kim1, Motoaki Sugiura1, Hyeonjeong Jeong1; 1Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan)
Embodied theories propose that understanding language involves the partial reinstatement of bodily and sensorimotor states associated with described action or experience. In principle, this framework extends to emotional experience and its underlying bodily states, including those arising from the viscera. However, compared to exteroceptive and action-related simulation, neural evidence for interoceptive reinstatement through language remains scarce. Given that reinstated bodily feelings should preserve information of their bodily location, the present study investigates whether the neural representations recruited by language expressions preserve this information structure. We examine two types of expressions: those with explicit (e.g., anger was boiling in my gut) and implicit reference to a bodily location (e.g., my anger was boiling). Here, implicit reference arises from culturally entrenched associations of particular emotions and the bodily source of their feelings in Japanese, namely of sadness to the heart and anger to the stomach. Adult native speakers of Japanese will complete two tasks during fMRI scanning. In the language task, each trial begins with a first-person narrative describing a naturalistic situation of anger or sadness. This is followed by a target sentence expressing the situated emotion in terms of a bodily feeling, either with explicit bodily reference or without specifying a bodily location. After each trial, participants judge the temporal profile of the emotion expressed in the target sentence on a 4-point scale, where ‘1’ indicates ‘arises instantaneously’ and ‘4’ indicates ‘gradually intensifies over time’. The task is intended to encourage in-depth semantic processing without explicitly directing attention to bodily location. Outside the scanner, participants indicate the bodily location (head, chest, stomach, or other) they associate with each implicit-reference expression, providing a measure of individual differences in implicit body-emotion mappings. In a separate interoceptive attention task, participants are instructed—based on a word cue—to focus their attention entirely on sensations originating from the heart, stomach, or a visually presented control stimulus. We will conduct a multivoxel pattern-based classification analysis to examine whether the neural distinction between cardiac and gastric interoception learned from the attention task generalizes to neural activity patterns elicited during the language task within the same individuals. If comprehension reinstates neural representations of bodily states, then a classifier trained to distinguish heart- versus stomach-interoception should generalize to distinguish embodied expressions of sadness (e.g., sadness surged in my chest) from those of anger (e.g., anger surged in my stomach). Above-chance cross-task classification for expressions with implicit reference to a bodily location would further suggest that speakers internally infer bodily locations based on culturally shared conceptualizations of emotion embedded in everyday language. Greater classification accuracy is expected in individuals whose body-emotion mappings better align with the cultural convention. Together, these findings would provide evidence that language comprehension recruits neural representations of bodily feelings, extending embodied accounts of language beyond exteroceptive and action-related simulation to emotional experience grounded in interoception.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics,