Brain Activity Prolongs Life
14/04/2014 17:18
Brain Activity Prolongs Life.
Many phrases reveal how emotions attack 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 column across cultures. The researchers coaxed Finnish, Swedish and Taiwanese participants into atmosphere various emotions and then asked them to link their feelings to body parts. They connected annoyance to the head, chest, arms and hands; disgust to the head, hands and lower chest; conceit 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 reaction was the consistency of the ratings, both across individuals and across all the tested jargon groups and cultures," said study lead author Lauri Nummenmaa, an helpmeet 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 commiserate how emotions production and "doesn't show a thing". But for his part, Nummenmaa said the enquiry is useful because it sheds light on how emotions and the body are interconnected. "We wanted to understand how the body and the sit with work together for generating emotions. By mapping the bodily changes associated with emotions, we also aimed to apprehend 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 persuade feelings out of the participants by showing them impassioned words, stories, clips from movies and facial expressions. Then the participants colored the silhouettes to disclose the body areas they felt were tasteful most or least active. The end was to not mention emotions directly to the participants but instead to make them "feel abundant emotions," Nummenmaa said.
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 magnanimity rate. And people linked all the emotions to the head, suggesting a possible link to leader activity. But Zak said the study failed to consider that people often feel more than one feeling at a time.
Or that a person's own comprehension of emotion can be misleading since the "areas in the brain that process emotions care for to be largely outside of our conscious awareness. It would make more sense, Zak said, to exactly measure activity in the body, such as sweat and temperature, to make sure people's perceptions have some constituent in reality. Nummenmaa said he expects future research to go in that direction.
How might the current investigating be useful? Zak is skeptical that it could be, but the study lead author is hopeful. "Many demented disorders are associated with altered functioning of the emotional system, so unraveling how emotions coordinate with the minds and bodies of well individuals is important for developing treatments for such disorders. Next, the researchers want to endure if these emotion-body connections change in people who are anxious or depressed scriptovore.com. "Also, we are interested in how children and adolescents suffer their emotions in their bodies," Nummenmaa said.
Many phrases reveal how emotions attack 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 column across cultures. The researchers coaxed Finnish, Swedish and Taiwanese participants into atmosphere various emotions and then asked them to link their feelings to body parts. They connected annoyance to the head, chest, arms and hands; disgust to the head, hands and lower chest; conceit 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 reaction was the consistency of the ratings, both across individuals and across all the tested jargon groups and cultures," said study lead author Lauri Nummenmaa, an helpmeet 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 commiserate how emotions production and "doesn't show a thing". But for his part, Nummenmaa said the enquiry is useful because it sheds light on how emotions and the body are interconnected. "We wanted to understand how the body and the sit with work together for generating emotions. By mapping the bodily changes associated with emotions, we also aimed to apprehend 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 persuade feelings out of the participants by showing them impassioned words, stories, clips from movies and facial expressions. Then the participants colored the silhouettes to disclose the body areas they felt were tasteful most or least active. The end was to not mention emotions directly to the participants but instead to make them "feel abundant emotions," Nummenmaa said.
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 magnanimity rate. And people linked all the emotions to the head, suggesting a possible link to leader activity. But Zak said the study failed to consider that people often feel more than one feeling at a time.
Or that a person's own comprehension of emotion can be misleading since the "areas in the brain that process emotions care for to be largely outside of our conscious awareness. It would make more sense, Zak said, to exactly measure activity in the body, such as sweat and temperature, to make sure people's perceptions have some constituent in reality. Nummenmaa said he expects future research to go in that direction.
How might the current investigating be useful? Zak is skeptical that it could be, but the study lead author is hopeful. "Many demented disorders are associated with altered functioning of the emotional system, so unraveling how emotions coordinate with the minds and bodies of well individuals is important for developing treatments for such disorders. Next, the researchers want to endure if these emotion-body connections change in people who are anxious or depressed scriptovore.com. "Also, we are interested in how children and adolescents suffer their emotions in their bodies," Nummenmaa said.