Chapter summary: presents evidence from research on the physiology of emotion to elucidate all the ways in which emotions are generated in the brain and body physiology, and to establish that an emotion and its conscious experience can involve the entirety of the brain and body physiology.
As we saw in the examples in chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4, emotional embodiment involves the expansion and regulation of the body and the brain to expand and regulate the conscious experience of emotion in as much of the brain and body physiology as possible, to create a greater capacity to tolerate and stay with the emotional experience over a longer period of time. Two critical assumptions underlie this method:
These assumptions might sound bold and even a bit crazy. After all, it is not at all our common experience that we experience emotions throughout our brain and body physiology. The question of whether there is adequate scientific evidence to support such assumptions comes up often and early among therapists in every country where I teach. Other questions also arise on a regular basis: What do emotions have to do with the body? Isn’t emotion strictly a brain phenomenon?
Even after I have demonstrated that a difficult emotion, such as grief or fear, could be experienced consciously throughout the body and brain physiology, someone will invariably ask: Is that real, or is it caused by your suggestion? Or by the participant’s need to perform in front of the group? These are very reasonable questions. I also ran into them in my own mind in the early stages of developing the work of emotional embodiment.
We do not consciously experience emotions throughout the brain and body physiology on a daily basis. This is in part because we are limited by a lack of awareness that we bring to the experience of the body, in life and in therapy. It is also in part because, as we will see later, we defend against the greater involvement of the brain and body physiology in the generation and experience of emotions, through psychological as well as physiological defenses that eventually contribute to our pathologies. Despite the mounting scientific evidence of the role of the body in emotional and other psychological experiences, the research most therapists are exposed to in their training is focused more on the brain than on the body. The public at large is also exposed to the same media bias toward the brain when research on emotion is presented.
The most important reason why we do not consciously experience emotions all over the brain and body physiology is because it is not necessary to do so to live a healthy life. Emotions do not have to be always fully embodied or conscious experiences for them to play an important role in our lives. Just feeling a jolt of fear on the right side of my body when a car approaches dangerously close on the right might be enough to alert me to step aside, and I might not even consciously experience the fear before I move to protect myself. Therefore, it is important to remember that there is no lifestyle prescription whatsoever implied here. This book does not suggest that we ought to consciously experience every instance of emotion in every waking moment in as much of the brain and body physiology as possible. It does suggest that we use the potential we have for such complete emotional embodiment as the basis for developing a greater capacity for emotion as a therapeutic and self-help method, to resolve unresolved emotions and the difficulties they cause.
Emotion is a very complex phenomenon. There are many different theories about how the brain and the body are involved in generating and experiencing emotions, with differing perspectives on the importance of the brain versus the body. There are differing views on the extent to which emotions are innate dispositions endowed upon us by evolution, the extent to which cognitive appraisal is involved prior to emotional experience, and the extent to which emotions are constructed by our brains based on our body experience with the aid of language. There is contradictory evidence on whether different emotions have different distinct neural (brain) and body patterns. There are also different opinions on the function or purpose of emotion, e.g., for communicating our inner states to others, a quick assessment of how we are doing with respect to our homeostasis, energy management, survival, or some other purpose.
The more I study the research on emotions, the more I am convinced there is no one way in which emotions are generated and experienced in the brain and body physiology; rather, there are many ways. The debates in the field of research on emotions, especially the brain versus body debate, brings to mind the old Indian story about a group of blind men touching different parts of an elephant. The man who touched the trunk thought he was touching a thick snake, the one touching the tail thought it was a rope, the one touching the leg thought it was a tree trunk, and so on. Each man insisted that his own unique experience of the elephant was correct, and the others had to be in error. For those of you who wish to explore our present scientific understanding of emotion, I highly recommend two books: The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions edited by Fox, Lapate, Shackman, and Davison (2018)1 and The Feeling Brain: The Biology and Psychology of Emotions by Johnston and Olson (2015).2
Before we review and discuss the key findings on the physiology of emotions that are relevant to the work of emotional embodiment, let us get clear about the terminology we will use throughout the book. For the sake of simplicity, we will use the single term “emotion” to refer to the various terms such as affect, feeling, mood, and temperament that are used in the literature to differentiate states or types of emotion. For example, both mood and temperament can be thought of as persistent emotional states. Damasio defines a feeling as a conscious emotion, in which emotion comes first and feeling later, distinguishing emotion from affective experience.3 Here, we will use conscious emotion and unconscious emotion as terms if we need to distinguish between conscious and unconscious emotional experience. A person might or might not be consciously aware of their envy when they make disparaging statements about a person they envy. The terms “experience of emotion” and “emotional experience” will refer to a conscious experience of emotion unless specified otherwise.
The earliest theory of emotion in the history of the physiology of emotion, the James-Lange theory, gave the body the primary role in generating emotion. American psychologist William James published his essay “What Is an Emotion?” in 1884.4 A year later, Danish physician Carl Lange published his independent findings in an essay titled “On Emotions: A Psychophysiological Study.”5 The combined findings of these two pioneers came to be known as the James-Lange theory of emotion. This theory proposes that emotion is first generated in the body through changes in the voluntary muscles by the somatic nervous system; changes in the organs, glands, and blood vessels by the autonomic nervous system; and changes in the secretions of the glands of the endocrine system, such as the adrenal glands that empty products such as cortisol directly into the bloodstream.
When there is a significant change in a person’s environment, the person has to do something with their body to cope with the change. If a hiker were to be suddenly confronted by a menacing bear, then the person has to generate a lot of energy through the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system to fuel the voluntary muscular system to run from the bear or fight it. According to the James-Lange theory, the pattern of body sensations generated by these changes is what the brain becomes aware of as emotion. The brain was assumed to have the capacity to differentiate, recognize, and experience body sensations as different emotions. In our bear example, the person who runs will generate body sensations of fear, and the person who fights will generate body sensations of anger. One could presumably alternate between the two emotions in quick succession, generating both of them.
Please note that the James-Lange theory did not rule out a role for the brain in emotional experience. Emotions are ultimately experienced through the brain. What it implied was that the body is absolutely necessary for the generation of an emotional experience; that is, it cannot be generated in the physiology of the brain alone. The theory said the sensory and motor cortices of the brain, which belong to the external layer of the brain called the cortex, are the areas where the emotion generated in the body became conscious. The theory did not offer any insight on whether the brain was involved in any conscious or unconscious process other than the perception of the environment and the generation of automatic responses in the body, programmed by evolution, that became the basis of emotional experiences. The brain’s ability to instantly recognize a pattern in the incoming information about the environment that triggers the instinctual response was implied. Please remember that this theory was formulated in the 1880s, when what we knew about the brain was quite limited.
The James-Lange theory was a paradigm shift in our understanding of emotion.6 It not only put behavior ahead of emotion; it also made behavior the cause of emotion, at least to begin with. It challenged and still challenges our common experience of the order in which things unfold, which runs as follows: we perceive the world, evaluate it, have an emotional response on the basis of our evaluation, and then respond to the world with appropriate behavior to safeguard our well-being in the situation. To this day, this is the model that most of us use, in therapy and in life. However counterintuitive the model of behavior preceding emotion might appear, the accumulated evidence that this happens in most (if not all) instances is considerable. Please see the book Feelings: The Perception of the Self by Larry D. Baird (2007) for evidence from hundreds of studies in which behavior precedes and determines emotion.7 For example, the work of Ekman and his colleagues shows that voluntary facial action generates emotion-specific nervous system activity.8
The James-Lange theory was challenged in 1927 by James’s former undergraduate student (and later his Harvard colleague) Walter Cannon, a neurologist who is often credited with the conceptualization of the “fight or flight” and “freeze” responses that are the staple of trauma therapy these days. Cannon is also known for the concept of homeostasis, which is the body’s tendency to maintain optimal internal conditions in the face of widely fluctuating external conditions.9 Cannon and his former student Philip Bard did not just say that emotion is generated in the brain and that behavior followed emotion; they declared that there is no way the body could be involved in the process of generating or regulating emotion.10 What about the all-too-common experience of feeling gripping fear in the abdomen or the happy feeling of love in the chest? They are just sensations from the brain preparing the body to deal with the change in the environment triggering the emotion in the brain. Expressing emotion was seen as a means to return the organism to homeostasis or a balanced state of internal well-being.
The James-Lange theory located the conscious experience of emotion in the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain. The Cannon-Bard theory also identified the cortex as the place where emotion became conscious as an experience. It did not precisely locate any brain region where emotion is generated. However, it pointed to the subcortical or interior layer of the brain, especially the thalamus and the hypothalamus, as the location where emotional expression is initiated.
The James-Lange and Cannon-Bard theories are extremely important because almost all the subsequent orientations of emotion research were inspired by one or both of them. The Cannon-Bard theory shifted the focus of emotion research from the body to the brain for a very long time, until research on the brain itself started to point back to the importance of the body toward the end of the twentieth century. This turnaround has led to a renewed interest in the James-Lange theory, and the updating of it with new evidence from brain research. As for the Cannon-Bard theory, its influence on research on the role of the brain in emotion is also substantial. The subsequent discoveries relating to the role of subcortical brain structures in the generation and expression of emotion, as well as the role of cortical brain structures in regulating cognition and emotion and making them conscious, all have roots in the Cannon-Bard theory.
No theory, including the James-Lange theory, denies a role for the brain in emotional experience. The issue all along has been the extent to which the body plays a role in this experience. The neuroscientific evidence that has emerged since the second half of the twentieth century shows that body experience is involved in the generation and experience of emotion in the brain11 and that the brain can generate emotional experiences without current input from the body by recalling past emotional experiences generated by past body experiences (to quickly predict possible emotional reactions to current situations).12 This evidence poses the question of whether it is possible to generate and have experiences of emotion in the brain that do not involve the present or past experience of the body in any way. We will answer this question later in this chapter. For now, let us turn our focus to how modern brain research has made the body once again a key player in the generation and experience of emotion.
Recent neuroscience research returned the body to the center of emotional experience in a couple of ways. First, it countered the theoretical and empirical limitations of the research on the Cannon-Bard theory that led to the conclusion that the body is not involved in emotional experience. Second, it used painstaking neuroanatomical work to show how the brain gathers information from the body and uses it in the construction of emotion. Let us look at each of these streams of research in turn.
The body can be likened to an orchestra with a large number of instruments (or body systems) that can play a wide variety of melodies (or emotions) by creating complex arrays (patterns) of physiological changes. During Cannon’s time, it was believed that the autonomic nervous system, and especially its sympathetic nervous system, behaved in the same way in all the areas controlled by it. We now know that the autonomic nervous system can vary its reactions from one part of the body to another.13 For example, different people’s bodies might all be involved in dealing with a shared situation (such as a common threat) but in different ways, with each of them generating similar but differing arrays of physiological changes, even when all of them are running away from the threat. Every person does not use the same muscles to the same degree in the act of running away from a threat. Similarly, when a given person faces multiple instances of a similar occasion, their body might not be involved in the same way each time, creating similar but varying arrays of physiological changes in response to the situation.
These similar but varying physiological responses to the same or similar situations can be likened to the similar but variable patterns we might observe in a kaleidoscope on successive turns of it. For a few turns at least, we can continue to see the original pattern, even though the elements get rearranged with every turn. Just as our brains can observe a common pattern among the variable patterns created by successive turns of a kaleidoscope, our brains are capable of recognizing a unique pattern of physiological changes for an emotion such as fear as a result of observing slightly different variations of it on different occasions. And just as our brains can observe, after many turns of the kaleidoscope, that the original pattern has been replaced by a new pattern, even though we might still observe some arrangements that are common to both patterns, our brains can also detect different patterns of physiological changes for different emotions in arrays of physiological changes that might have some (but not all) elements in common.
The brain is now recognized as having the ability to recognize such patterns in complex and overlapping information from a very early age.14 The research that established the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion typically measured only a few changes, such as heart rate and breath rate, and concluded that the body cannot be the source of emotion if two distinct emotions such as fear and anger measured the same (either low or high) on both. In order to realistically study whether there are different physiological patterns for different emotions, such as happiness and sadness, later research usually involved the measurement of a greater number of physiological changes.
A study measuring heartbeat and skin conductance rate showed different patterns of physiological changes for different basic emotions, such as happiness, sadness, fear, and anger.15 More recent studies took more differentiated measurements of changes in the autonomic nervous system itself, such as different styles or types of breathing as opposed to the simple breath rate.16 Other research took more detailed measures of cardiovascular and respiratory responses such as properties of heart rate and its variability, changes in the respiratory period, and the interval between respiratory waves, and analyzed them by multivariate statistical methods.17 Newer research has been more successful in providing evidence that the body could be involved in the generation of distinct emotional experiences through generating distinct patterns of sensations for different emotions.
Also, more recent studies based on self-reports of broad changes in parts of the body in the experience of all basic and some complex emotions have found different patterns of body changes for different basic emotions, such as happiness and sadness, and for complex emotions, such as anxiety and depression.18,19 These cross-cultural studies involved a large number of subjects and employed multivariate statistical methods that allowed for variations across individuals to arrive at “a common pattern of body changes” that is distinct for each emotion.
We now turn to the other set of findings in neuroscience that restored the body to its important role in emotion.
We start with what we know now about how the brain receives and processes information from the body. From previous research we know that the brain constantly receives information through different body systems: the nerves, the blood, and extracellular fluid, the fluid that circulates between cells, bringing them nutrients and messages. Chemical messengers, such as peptides, which are capable of traveling between the brain and the body, are found in extracellular fluids of the brain and the body. The brain gathers a great deal of information about activity on different levels within each body system. For example, the brain gathers information about what is happening at the level of individual muscle cells in terms of chemistry, as well as at the level of an entire muscle in terms of tension or relaxation. The brain receives and processes information such as “signals related to pain states; body temperature; flush; itch; tickle; shudder; visceral and genital sensations; the state of the smooth musculature and other viscera; local pH; glucose; osmolality; presence of inflammatory agents; and so forth.”20
The neural or brain image of such detailed information about the body is called a detailed “body map.” We know the brain is capable of processing such detailed information to produce higher-order body maps through aggregation and abstraction. For example, the brain can be aware of individual sensations in different parts of an arm or of how the whole arm feels overall—“good” or “bad”—by collecting and inferring the meaning of individual sensations into an overall neural body map of the arm feeling good or bad. The overall sense of feeling good or bad is an example of a higher-order body map of the arm. The sensations from different components of the arm, such as the skin, the muscles, and the joints that contribute to this higher-order body map experience of feeling good or bad, are called lower-order body maps of sensations from the skin, the muscles, and the joints.
We also know the brain is capable of storing and recalling information about different parts of the body at different levels of aggregation and abstraction for prediction.21 For example, if we want to predict and compare the emotional consequences of different behavioral responses to a current situation in order to choose the best way to respond to the situation, we can run such simulations in the brain by recalling similar experiences from the past.
The brain generates and experiences emotions based more on the aggregate or abstract neural images it creates than on the detailed information it receives from the body.22 What do we mean by an aggregate or abstract neural image? When we look at Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting of a woman with an umbrella holding a child’s hand on the bank of a river on a summer evening, consisting of thousands and thousands of colored dots, we are observing the image of the woman, the umbrella, the child, and the river at an aggregate or abstract level. However, when we move close enough to the painting, all we can see are the thousands and thousands of dots the images are made of. In the same way, we come to know that we are feeling good, bad, or neutral about a relationship by aggregating and abstracting a large number of microsensations from the body, which can be likened to the thousands and thousands of dots that make up Seurat’s painting. The images of the woman, the umbrella, and the river are likened to the higher-order neural maps of the body in the brain, and the dots of paint that form those images can be likened to the lower-order neural maps of the body.
These higher-order body maps that give rise to the emotions of good, bad, or neutral might break down in terms of body changes that can vary considerably across individuals for a single emotion, and they can vary in the same person across different occasions.23 One can be happy or sad in different ways on different occasions, depending on which body systems are involved and how they are involved. For example, an instance of sadness or happiness can involve one’s heart and lungs to different degrees. It can involve the breath rate and the constriction or relaxation of the lung tissue. It can also involve the heart rate and the constriction or relaxation of the heart musculature, or it can involve both to different degrees. Such variability can also occur across individuals when they are all experiencing similar emotions (fear, horror, and sadness, for example) in a shared situation, such as watching the Challenger space shuttle explode and fall to the earth a few minutes after takeoff.
Likewise, the same orchestra can play the same melody with different combinations of instruments, and everyone who knows the melody can still recognize it. Even someone who does not know a melody can find the common melody after being exposed to a number of different renditions of it with different sets of musical instruments. In the same way, the brain is known to be capable from infancy of finding patterns in data and creating categories out of the patterns it observes.
So far, we have seen how the brain can generate emotion from current body experience. According to Damasio, the brain also has the ability to generate quick predictions of emotional reactions to familiar situations by recalling past body experiences without involving the body in the present.24 This ability, which he calls “the as-if body loop,” conserves energy and makes optimal use of past experience to respond to familiar situations. In Barrett’s constructivist theory of emotions, such predictions are always involved in every emotional experience.25 Every emotional experience is constructed by the brain as a combination of:
In case there is any disbelief that prediction is a component in emotional experiences, please note that there is now adequate evidence that prediction based on past experience is involved even in perception through the five senses.26
In her book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett describes how language is involved in the construction of simple and complex emotional experiences.27 From infancy, the brain is capable of recognizing patterns in inner and outer experience and attaching words to them. Every flying object might initially be called a “bird,” a simple concept. Eventually, flying objects are differentiated into more complex concepts (e.g., “peacock,” “robin,” “passenger plane,” “fighter plane”) that are based on observations of features that distinguish them, even though they all fly. In the same way, a situation, as well as the emotional experience of it, can be described with simple emotion concepts such as “good,” “bad,” “painful,” “pleasurable,” “sad,” or “happy”; or with more complex emotion concepts such as the “fear of failing to live up to one’s father’s expectations” and “fear of falling from a high place.”
Every instance of “fear of falling from a high place” is going to vary, from “fear of falling from a building” to ‘”fear of falling from a tree” to “falling down while walking on posts on a fence in childhood,” for example. Every instance of “falling from a building” or “falling from a tree” or “falling from a fence” will also vary, because our prediction, as well as our actual behavior, is never exactly the same in each of these situations. Two individuals exposed to the same situation, “the risk of falling from a high place,” cannot be expected to have the same predicted or actual perception and evaluation of the situation, nor the same inner and outer behavioral responses initiated to cope with it, nor the same body changes that occur as a consequence. For example, faced with the same situation of falling from a fence, one person might predict worse consequences from the fall than another person, depending on their past experiences of such falls. One person might make further attempts to avert the fall, whereas another might take the fall for granted and prepare the body for the inevitable fall.
People can, however, communicate their diverse emotional experiences with simple emotion concepts in words such as “bad,” “scary,” and so on. In order to communicate their emotional experiences more accurately, they have to describe them with complex emotion concepts in phrases such as “fear of falling down while walking on posts on a fence in childhood.” We can expect even greater variation in perception, evaluation, behavioral response, and consequent body changes involving “fear of failing to live up to one’s father’s expectations” across individuals, families, subcultures, and cultures.
“Fear of failing to live up to one’s father’s expectations” is a complex instance of emotion with much potential variation, especially across cultures, as the terms of relationship with one’s father might vary. In more complex emotional experiences such as this, language plays a greater role in identifying and communicating one’s emotional experiences to others. Those within the same culture and the same family system are more likely to be able to communicate and understand such complex emotional experiences in each other.
We communicate emotional states verbally, through language with simple and complex emotion concepts, and nonverbally, through such features as facial and body expression, and tone of voice. When others receive such information from us, they can try to understand what we are going through by using their past experiences to simulate what they might feel in similar situations in their brains and bodies, or by mirroring our body and facial expressions and tone of voice. The research on “mirror neurons” focuses on identifying neurons in our brains that mimic the movements we see others make, in order to get at the inner experience of others.28 As an example, I remember how good my body felt as I came out of an afternoon performance of a Cirque de Soleil show. It felt so good because my brain could, without moving, share the pleasure their bodies were experiencing as they executed such masterful routines.
All human beings share a common genetic heritage. Our brains and bodies are close to each other in their physical makeup. We might vary widely in terms of our psychological response to similar situations, but we share many common experiences: pain and pleasure, aversion and attraction, feeling good or bad, feeling regulated or dysregulated. These experiences might vary due to constitutional variations in people’s physical makeup, but we have enough in common that we can understand each other when we use these simple words to communicate aspects of our emotional experience to each other.
Perhaps this is how the universal or basic emotions of sadness, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise evolved and became shared patterns of emotional experience. Perhaps the more frequent universal experiences of feeling good or bad can be called universal or basic sensorimotor emotions, which might be harder to express through facial expression than Darwin’s list of universal basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust). A sensorimotor emotion is a psychologically meaningful physiological state of the brain or the body that cannot be deconstructed into basic or complex emotions. Because basic sensorimotor emotions, like pain and pleasure, are always present either on their own or as part and parcel of all simple and complex emotions, we will see later how they can be useful in emotional embodiment work, especially with those who have difficulty in experiencing or differentiating their emotions.
Let’s return to the earlier example of “fear of failing to live up to one’s father’s expectations” to examine how it might be communicated across individuals and cultures. It is a complex instance of emotion with much potential variation, even within the same person across all the situations in which it is evoked. This is even more true with regard to differences across cultures, which can affect the terms of how the relationship with one’s father might vary. Therefore, perhaps there is a greater chance of communicating this emotion in terms of simple emotion concepts such as “bad” or “painful” or “sad,” to at least get some essential aspect of the experience across. Such simple emotion concepts might well be the candidates for universal basic emotions that can be communicated across cultures, because all cultures appear to have words to describe otherwise complex and varied emotional experiences through simple and reductive emotion concepts.
However, such concepts might not quite capture the complex experience of “fear of failing to live up to one’s father’s expectations” across individuals and cultures. Those within the same culture and the same family system, who have shared lived experiences, are more likely to be able to communicate about and understand complex emotional experiences such as “fear of failing to live up to one’s father’s expectations” in each other. In more complex emotional experiences, language therefore plays a greater role in identifying and communicating one’s emotional experiences to others.
The standard assumption is that we come to understand each other’s emotional states and to empathize with each other by exchanging information about emotion through the five senses. This assumption, based in Western phenomenology, posits that the only way for individuals to gather information about the inner body and brain states of others is to use their external senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. This assumption strengthens the idea that it is not so easy for individuals to share their unique emotional experiences with each other.
Now, however, considerable research from multiple disciplines shows that our bodies and brains are capable of sending and receiving information through the measurable frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, the phenomenon we have already referred to as interpersonal resonance, or simply resonance.29,30 Even though our unique bodies might still filter the information received through resonance, we can directly exchange information on emotions with each other in this manner. We can use resonance to learn about how others experience, understand, and label different emotions, which increases the likelihood that we have more shared brain and body patterns in the experience of different emotions than the constructive theory of emotion might lead us to believe.
The parts of the brain that have been identified as being involved with processing information from the body have now become collectively known as the “interoceptive network.” Scientists such as Antonio Damasio and Bud Craig have identified several parts of the brain, especially the insular cortex, as constituting the interoceptive network. For example, Damasio identifies the sensory motor cortices (I and II), the insular cortex, the cingulate cortex, the thalamus, the hypothalamus, and the brain stem nuclei in the tegmentum as participating in the interoceptive network.31 Many brain areas that have been identified as involved in processing emotion (in studies by leading researchers such as Walter Cannon, Philip Bard, James Papez, Paul McLean, and Joseph E. LeDoux) have also been found to be involved in processing body information. Important brain areas that constitute the interoceptive network, such as the anterior insular cortex, have been found to be the same brain areas that become active when people report that they are subjectively experiencing emotions.32
Now, the findings showing that brain areas that specialize in processing body information are also involved in processing emotion do not necessarily mean that one has to do with the other. Emotional experience need not necessarily depend on or derive from body experience; it could just be that those brain areas happen to have more than one function in common. Still, there is growing evidence showing how body states shape emotions.33 There is also increasing evidence that our capacity for conscious emotional experience is highly correlated with our capacity for conscious body experience.34 This also suggests that emotions are dependent on body states.
The senses of smell, taste, hearing, sight, and touch are called the external or exteroceptive senses. The sense through which we come to know what is happening in our body on the inside is called the internal or interoceptive sense. The brain’s conscious and unconscious interoception of the body helps us perform a number of functions, including homeostasis, energy management, and survival.35 It turns out that those of us who are better at interoception or body sensing—for example, those who can reliably estimate how many times their heart beats in a certain time period—also experience emotions more consciously and at higher levels of intensity than those who have a poorer interoceptive sense. (It also turns out that they have better cognitive functioning, and they spend less energy during strenuous exercise.)
The findings we have discussed in this chapter constitute a strong case for the potential involvement of the entire body in the generation and experience of emotion. To review, those findings are as follows:
There is near unanimity among emotion researchers of all stripes that one of the important functions of emotion is the same as the primary goal of interoception: helping us with homeostasis, energy management, and survival. All other functions that are attributed to emotions—expressing emotions to let others know how we feel (which has to do with communication, attachment, and bonding), releasing inner tension and regulating ourselves through acts such as crying (related to healing), and guiding all aspects of cognition and behavior (providing energy and motivation for action)—can ultimately be reduced to the three fundamental functions of homeostasis, energy management, and survival. When I notice that I am feeling bad after separating from my wife, I cannot be doing well in terms of my homeostasis, energy management, or survival. When I enjoy being with my wife, that feeling moves my brain and body physiology in the direction of greater well-being.
Emotion and interoception thus share the same goals: homeostasis, energy management, and survival. Therefore, it makes sense that the information they use to achieve their common goals is the same—information on the body’s condition—even though they might use different aggregates and abstractions of the same data. For instance, the sense of loss of balance that helps us prevent a fall and the unpleasant emotional experience of sinking and falling endlessly upon learning that a dear one has suddenly died in an accident have much in common in terms of physiological changes that give rise to them.
To summarize what we have learned so far from the overlapping bodies of research on interoception and emotion: the interoceptive sense and the interoceptive network gather information about the body and process in the brain to generate two types of information. One type of information is about body states (such as “fall in blood sugar level,” “hunger,” or feeling “good” or “bad”) that are not commonly understood as emotions. Another type of information is about feeling “good” or “bad” or “sad” or “mad,” states that are widely understood as emotions when feeling “good” or “bad” can be connected psychologically to situations we face. Both types of information are geared to help the organism with homeostasis, energy management, and survival in different ways. Emotional states, especially those that tell us how we are doing socially, can guide subsequent behavior toward improvements in our homeostatic condition, energy utilization, and survival. Information in the form of body states and emotional states is helpful to the organism, even when these states are not conscious experiences. However, conscious experiences of body states and emotional states confer additional advantages for homeostasis, energy management, and survival.
Because neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin can induce and alter emotional states within the brain’s physiology, it appears that the brain has the ability to generate emotion on its own. The body is known to have this ability too. Whether activated by the brain or on its own, the body can secrete endogenous substances such as sexual and other hormones that, among their many functions, can induce or alter emotional experiences.
The ability of the brain to rapidly induce or alter emotional states through secretion of such endogenous substances can be an evolutionary advantage. Organisms are often overwhelmed when they are faced with situations that are beyond their capacity. The physiology of a person faced with overwhelming and inescapable trauma, such as torture, can become so dysregulated that it could lead to death, if it were not for endogenous biochemistry kicking in to regulate brain and body physiology to maintain some mental and physical capability to continue to cope with the threat. Such mechanisms are also often helpful in coping with ordinary life situations when strong emotional reactions might be counterproductive, as in a situation in which one is being evaluated unfairly by a supervisor. When emotional discomfort registers in the brain, the brain might be able to soothe that discomfort with the secretion of endogenous opioids. It makes sense that evolution would genetically hardwire such mechanisms into the developmental sequence of our physiology.
There are some who believe that the brain cannot recall an emotion generated through the body without involving the body again to some extent. But just as we can recall a stored visual image without involving the eyes, we should be able to recall a body experience without involving the entire body. The brain, with such a long history of evolution, has at least some innate capacity to make a quick prediction, based not only on the experience of this body in this life but on the experience of all the bodies of all the species that this body has evolved from as well. Body experiences become neural (brain) images with varying levels of aggregation and abstraction of body experience. These images exist in the physiology of the brain, its structure and its biochemistry. It is therefore not impossible to imagine evolution imprinting the brain with an innate ability to evoke certain experiences, such as universal basic emotions, in response to patterns perceived in the world through the five external senses as well as through the internal interoceptive sense.
There is precedent in the literature on emotions for such a possibility. The evolutionary perspective of Charles Darwin,36 based on cross-cultural evidence for universal emotions, has been supported by studies from a long line of researchers, including Paul Ekman.37 If evolution can program emotional displays in the body as innate tendencies, and emotional displays in the body can generate different emotional experiences with distinct neural patterns in the brain,38 would it not be the next logical step in evolution to program in the brain a capacity to generate such emotional experiences independent of the body, to at least some extent? To enhance the brain’s capacity to predict is to improve its chances of survival. The history of research on emotions offers more evidence for this ability on the part of the brain. The innate ability of the brain to generate emotions through its hardware, independent of body experience, is a fundamental feature in the theories of Walter Cannon,39 Philip Bard,40 James Papez,41 Paul McLean,42 Jaap Panksepp,43 and Joseph E. LeDoux,44 all important researchers who have studied the role of the brain in emotion.
To arrive at the best possible cognitive assessment of a situation, the brain uses both present and past experience. This is an efficient strategy. Evidence shows that the brain does the same with emotional assessment: it uses experience handed down by evolution as innate predispositions, along with past body experiences and current input from the entire physiology, including that of the brain. This is the comprehensive theory of the physiology of emotion that I subscribe to, a perspective I arrived at after a laborious study of the literature on the neurophysiology of emotions. In the process, I gained valuable insights that formed the scientific basis of the work of emotional embodiment.
The integrative view emerging from the more recent research on the physiology of emotion—that both the brain and the body play significant roles in the generation and experience of emotion—is supported and even extended by the findings in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, a relatively young field of inquiry dating back to the late 1970s. Psychoneuroimmunology research focuses on “information substances,” chemical messenger molecules such as neurotransmitters or peptides, which circulate relatively freely among different systems of the body, including the brain, the autonomic nervous system, and the organs, through blood and fluids circulating between the cells.
When these molecules produced in one part of the body or brain reach another part of the body or brain, they bind themselves to special receptors on the surface of the target cells to alter the behavior of those cells. The information exchanges through this network account for 98 percent of all communication occurring in the body. In contrast, the information exchanges occurring in the nervous system account for a mere 2 percent. The production cells and receptor cells for these messenger molecules are distributed throughout the brain and the body. In the brain, they are concentrated in areas that traditional research on the physiology of emotions has identified as having to do more with emotion, leading researcher Candace Pert to describe these substances as “molecules of emotion.” Pert was the first scientist to discover opiate receptors in the brain, as she toiled away night after night in a lab with her baby strapped to her body. Pert was overlooked for the Nobel Prize for her discovery due to gender politics in scientific circles.
Pert summarized her findings about emotions from her psychoneuroimmunology research in her 1997 book The Molecules of Emotions: The Science behind Mind-Body Medicine. When asked whether an emotion is a brain or body phenomenon, based on the findings on the dynamics of various information substances in the brain and the body, she answered, “Why, it’s both! It’s not either/or; in fact it is both and neither. It’s simultaneous—a two-way street.”45 That is, the generation of emotion (for that matter, the generation of cognition and behavior as well) involves both the brain and the body. It does not make sense to talk of emotion, cognition, or behavior as belonging dichotomously to either the brain or the body.
We can talk about the different roles of the body or brain in emotion and its experience, but none of the body-specific or brain-specific roles can account for the totality of the generation and experience of emotion. The brain and the body can both be observed interacting and influencing each other all the time at the level of information substances. Physiological correlates or substrates of emotions in the form of information substances, such as neurotransmitters and peptides, can be generated first in the physiology of either the brain or the body. They can then set off sequences or domino effects, either by themselves or by involving other information substances that can quickly involve the entirety of the brain and body physiology.
If the generation of emotion could be initiated in either the brain or the body, it could also presumably be initiated in both places at the same time. This possibility supports a dynamic network systems conceptualization of the integrated nature of cells functioning across the brain and the body, wherein an impulse can involve activating multiple nodes or places at the same time, or it can start in one node or place and spread to other nodes or places. The physiological impulse for an emotion can therefore be initiated in the brain and the body at the same time; or it can be initiated in the brain or the body and spread rapidly to the rest of the brain and body physiology.
We can see that the findings on the physiology of emotions we reviewed earlier, along with the hypotheses from the molecular research we just explored, support each other in a number of ways. When the brain is involved in generating emotion through its innate mechanisms or through recalling earlier experiences before it involves the entire body for a reality check, we can think of the emotional impulse as originating in the brain. When the brain is generating an emotion from the enactment of internal behaviors to maintain homeostasis and to manage energy and outer behaviors to cope with the situation, we can think of the emotional impulse as originating in the body. Because the generation of emotion likely involves prediction based on innate mechanisms, recall of past body experiences, and current input from the body, we can think of the emotional impulse arising in both the brain and the body at the same time.
In the next chapter, we will look at the evidence for how cognition, emotion, and behavior are intricately intertwined in the physiology of the brain as well as the body, and how emotion plays a central role in the triad of cognition, emotion, and behavior. In the subsequent chapter, we will examine all the known dynamics or mechanisms through which emotional experiences are generated and defended against, and the role they play in the formation of psychophysiological symptoms. The following chapter in part II will look at the factors that determine our affect tolerance (our capacity to tolerate emotions) and then present the scientific rationale for how using the larger container of the brain and body physiology, especially the body physiology, can build a greater capacity for emotions, especially unpleasant emotions. Using this larger container can in turn improve our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functions as well as our health and well-being. The last chapter in part II will explore the different types of emotions and how we can access them to build a greater capacity for them.