# Where emotions are felt in the body: from one person's drawing, the emotion can be guessed one time in four

Pick one of the 13 emotions in your head and colour in where you feel it: red for the areas that become more active, blue for the less active ones. The page tries to guess it from the drawing alone, using the drawings of 3,954 people in a Finnish study.

anger · fear · disgust · happiness · sadness · surprise · anxiety · love · depression · contempt · pride · shame · jealousy

## Thirteen emotions, thirteen bodies

In 2020 a team of researchers in Finland published the drawings of 3,954 people in 101 countries. Each of them was shown two figures and, one at a time, 13 words such as “anger”, plus a neutral state, and coloured in on one figure the areas they feel becoming more active during that emotion, and on the other the areas that become less active.

Laid over one another, the drawings give the figures shown here. For anger the head, chest and hands are coloured. For love, the chest and abdomen. For depression almost the whole body appears as less active. Red and yellow show where the most “more active” paint gathered, blue where the “less active” paint did.

A picture of this kind has circulated since 2014, when the same team ran its first study with 701 participants. The figures here are the average of the 2020 drawings. The next chapters show what the average is made of.

## What each person drew

Each small figure is one participant's drawing, all for the same emotion. Some placed a few dots, some covered large areas, some traced only the outline.

Take two participants at random and lay their drawings over each other. For love, the part both coloured the same way is, for the median pair (half of all pairs have more, half less), 15% of everything either of them coloured. For disgust it is 4%, and in 24% of pairs the two share no spot coloured the same way.

One person's own drawings resemble each other more. Two different emotions coloured by the same person overlap, for the median pair, on 11% of the area. The same emotion coloured by two different people overlaps on 7%.

The average map is clear all the same: thousands of drawings that overlap a little leave the most colour in the same few places.

## Where most people meet

Here the colour shows how many participants coloured each spot: red on the left, blue on the right. The numbers give the percentage who covered at least a tenth of that zone.

Of the nine zones, the one coloured most often is the chest for love: 85% in red. For happiness, 81%. For anger, 76% coloured the head and 61% the hands.

At the one-tenth threshold, no zone passes 85% for any emotion.

## In sadness, the chest is red for some and blue for others

For sadness, 44% of participants coloured the chest as more active and 44% as less active. 12% coloured it both ways, once on each figure.

In fear the legs divide people in the same way: 26% coloured them red and 34% blue.

The choice of colour also differs from one emotion to the next. For depression, 93% used blue and 62% used red. For happiness, 99% used red and 41% used blue.

## What can be guessed from a single drawing

The page guesses with a rule learned from the participants' drawings: it compares a new drawing with the pattern of each emotion and picks the closest. Tested on drawings it had not seen while learning, it names the emotion first time for 24% of them and has the right one among its first three guesses for 50%. A blind guess would be right first time one time in 13, or 7.7%, and within three guesses 23% of the time.

Depression is the easiest to recognise (54%), followed by anger (40%), then happiness and love (38% each). Sadness is most often taken for depression (36% of drawings), and 22% of the love drawings are taken for happiness.

Fear (9%) is guessed barely above the level of chance, and contempt (5%) and jealousy (4%) below it.

The authors ran a similar test in 2014 on other participants: 24% for 14 categories (the 13 emotions and the neutral state), against 7% by chance. On the 2020 data, with the same 14 categories, it gives 23% here.

So the map of each emotion is clear only at the level of the crowd. One person's drawing says something about the emotion, but most of the time too little to name it.

## People under 30 put down the most paint

Of all the differences between groups that the authors looked for, they found only one large one: age. Their conclusion is that bodily sensations weaken with ageing. The correlation they report, recomputed here from the data, is −0.11.

By age group, the decline has a single step. Participants aged 30–39 put down 29% less paint than those aged 18–29. From 30 upwards no group falls below the 30–39 group, and at 50–59 there is even more paint than at 30–39.

Each person was asked once, so the data cannot separate age from generation. Only 234 participants are 60 or older.

## The 181 participants in the United Kingdom

181 participants connected from the United Kingdom, 157 of them women. The country was taken from the IP address, and the words were shown to everyone in English.

Their average maps resemble those of all the other participants: the mean correlation over the 13 emotions is 0.93. Groups of 181 participants drawn at random from those in the United States resemble the rest about as closely: 0.90 on average, between 0.87 and 0.93 in 95% of draws.

For none of the 13 emotions does the British group fall below the range of the American groups of the same size.

The authors compared 15 countries and concluded that the maps are largely universal; they report correlations above 0.82 between countries for the same emotion. Recomputed here on the countries' average maps, the correlation is 0.74 on average for the same emotion and 0.55 for two different emotions. Part of the resemblance between countries therefore does not depend on the emotion: the maps of two different emotions resemble each other too.

## Each emotion in numbers

A zone counts as coloured when at least a tenth of it is covered. The overlap is the part two randomly chosen participants coloured the same way, out of everything either of them coloured, for the median pair.

| Emotion | Drawings | Most often red | Most often blue | Overlap of two people | Guessed first time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anger | 3,921 | head, 76% | pelvis, 23% | 10% | 40% |
| Fear | 3,918 | chest, 64% | legs, 34% | 6% | 9% |
| Disgust | 3,860 | head, 54% | chest, abdomen, legs, 23% | 4% | 37% |
| Happiness | 3,905 | chest, 81% | feet, 11% | 13% | 38% |
| Sadness | 3,908 | chest, 44% | chest, 44% | 6% | 10% |
| Surprise | 3,891 | head, 68% | legs, 25% | 7% | 16% |
| Anxiety | 3,909 | chest, 63% | legs, 34% | 7% | 11% |
| Love | 3,913 | chest, 85% | legs, 19% | 15% | 38% |
| Depression | 3,886 | head, 34% | chest, 57% | 8% | 54% |
| Contempt | 3,674 | head, 63% | chest, abdomen, legs, 22% | 5% | 5% |
| Pride | 3,872 | chest, 74% | legs, 17% | 9% | 32% |
| Shame | 3,881 | head, 58% | hands, 33% | 5% | 21% |
| Jealousy | 3,847 | head, 61% | legs, 24% | 5% | 4% |

## Short answers

### Where is love felt in the body?

On average, in the chest: 85% of participants coloured it as more active. The abdomen (71%) and the head (70%) follow.

### Where is anger felt?

Most often in the head (76%), the chest (67%) and the hands (61%).

### Where are fear and anxiety felt?

Mostly in the chest: 64% coloured it as more active for fear and 63% for anxiety. The legs were coloured as less active more often than as more active, for both.

### What do these maps actually measure?

What people say they feel. Nobody measured the participants' pulse, temperature or muscle tension. The authors call them subjective feeling maps and note that real changes in the body are not strongly tied to what a person feels.

### Why doesn't the page guess right more often?

A likely reason: drawings of the same emotion differ a great deal from one person to the next, and one person's drawings of different emotions resemble each other more than two people's drawings of the same emotion do (11% against 7% overlap). You colour a single figure; the participants coloured two.

### What happens to my drawing?

It stays in the page open on your device. It is not sent anywhere and it is gone when you close or reload the page.

## The data and the method

The study. Sofia Volynets, Enrico Glerean, Jari Hietanen, Riitta Hari and Lauri Nummenmaa (Aalto University and the universities of Turku and Tampere) collected the drawings online with a tool called emBODY. 6,559 people registered. After exclusions (minors, fewer than ten emotions coloured, heights or weights outside limits set by the authors, a stated nationality that did not match the country of the IP address, drawings unrelated to the task) 3,954 remained. The paper appeared in the journal Emotion in 2020, and all the drawings are public under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Who the participants are. 82% are women, 84% have a university education, 37% connected from the United States. The mean age is 34.9, from 18 to 90. Everyone did the task in English. The results describe this group only.

What was recomputed here. The published files give the number of participants, the split by sex, the mean age, the 101 countries, the 15 countries with more than 45 participants and the correlation with age (−0.11), all identical to the paper. The guessing test uses the same reduction to 30 principal components and the same linear discriminant analysis as the 2014 paper; it is checked here on fifths of the participants held out in turn, and in the paper on 50 parts. It gives 23% for 14 categories, against 24% in the paper, and 37% for the six basic emotions plus the neutral state, against 38%. The 24% in the chapter on guessing is for 13 categories, without the neutral state.

The zones. The figure has 50,364 points. It was divided here into nine zones: head, neck, chest, abdomen, pelvis, arms, hands, legs and feet (with the ankles). A zone counts as coloured when at least 10% of it is covered in one colour. With a threshold of 5% or 20% the percentages in the text move by at most 13 points.

The overlap of two people. For each emotion 20,000 pairs of participants were drawn at random. For each pair, the area both coloured in the same colour was divided by the area at least one of them coloured.

How closely your drawing resembles the average. It is the correlation between your drawing and the average map of the emotion, set beside the same correlation computed for every participant against the average of the others.

How your drawing differs. Participants saw two figures, one for “more active” and one for “less active”, and English words; here there is one figure with two colours. In both, going over the same place again deepens the colour. The page places one point of colour every two pixels along a stroke, however fast the hand moves. The guessing rule was learned from the participants' drawings alone.

Jealousy or envy. The paper names the thirteenth emotion “jealousy”. In the data file the same column is called “Envy”, as in the 2014 study. Neither the paper nor the data file says which of the two words appeared on screen. The page uses the paper's word.

Age. “How much paint” means the mean absolute value over the whole image and all emotions, the measure the authors used; it grows both with the area coloured and with the number of passes. The chart shows each group's median against the median of the 18–29 group. For participants aged 30 and over, the correlation with age is 0.04.

- Volynets, Glerean, Hietanen, Hari, Nummenmaa: Bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal, Emotion 20(7), 2020: https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000624
- The study's data: the drawings of the 3,954 participants, Zenodo, CC BY 4.0: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2645846
- Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari, Hietanen: Bodily maps of emotions, PNAS 111(2), 2014: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1321664111
- The emBODY tool, the source of the figure (MIT licence): https://version.aalto.fi/gitlab/eglerean/embody

Participants' drawings: Volynets et al., 2020, CC BY 4.0. Figure: emBODY (Glerean, Nummenmaa, Suvilehto), MIT licence. The colours and the processing are this page's own.

https://mariuscomper.uk/emotiile-in-corp/en/