Bodily sensations in social scenarios: Where in the body?

Bodily states are fundamental to emotions′ emergence and are believed to constitute the first step in the chain of events that culminate in emotional awareness. Recent works have given fresh support to this view by showing that distinct topographical maps can be derived to describe how basic and more complex emotions are represented in the body. However, it is still unclear whether these bodily maps can also extend to emotions experienced specifically within social interactions and how these representations relate to basic emotions. To address this issue, we used the emBODY tool to obtain high-resolution bodily maps that represent the body activation and deactivation experienced by healthy participants in social scenarios depicting establishment or loss of social bonds. We show that clear patterns of activation/deactivation across the body emerge depending on the valence and on the characteristics of the single social scenarios, but also a common activation of head, chest and limbs across scenarios. Furthermore, we showed that maps related to complex social scenarios are strongly correlated with bodily states experienced in basic emotions, suggesting that the patterns of body activation/deactivation found for social scenarios might represent a combination of different basic emotions these experiences elicit. Our data tackle conscious emotional experiences and show for the first time how ′painful′ social events are felt on the body, providing findings that complement verbal reports and neuroimaging data on social rejection. Furthermore, they show that bodily feelings related to complex social scenarios, despite referring to unified independent emotional states, are also related to bodily correlates of basic emotions.

4 69 and physical threats points at the importance of social relationships for the survival of 70 the individual, to the extent that they are processed as those stimuli attempting the 71 physical well-being of the individual (13). Following this account, damages to social 72 connections activate the same neural and physiological 'alarm system' that responds 73 to other relevant survival threats, such as the experience of physical harm (14). In 74 support of this view, different studies have shown that experiences of social exclusion 75 trigger a broad spectrum of physiological reactions, like drops in skin temperature 76 (15), change in heart rates (16), and decreased interoceptive accuracy (17).

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Taken together these findings suggest a close and direct association between

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Interestingly, a tight link between bodily sensations and emotional processing 92 has been suggested also for experiences of social disconnection (13). Such experiences 5 93 are usually defined as 'painful', and felt emotions are often described in most of the 94 languages by referring to physical terms such as 'broken heart', 'hurt feelings', or 95 'cutting stab' (23  157 The emBODY tool (21) was used also to localize bodily sensations in social scenarios.
158 In each trial, participants viewed a short text presented in the center of the screen, 159 with two silhouettes placed on the right and left sides (Fig 1). The sentence described 160 either a negative or positive social scenario such as: bereavement, romantic rejection, 161 social exclusion, and negative evaluation (negative social scenarios); birth of a son, 162 romantic acceptance, social inclusion, and positive evaluation (positive social 8 163 scenarios, see Table 1). For each scenario, participants were asked draw on both 164 silhouettes the portions of the body where they felt activation (left silhouette) and 165 deactivation (right silhouette) when facing the event described in the sentence. 171 Table 1. List of social scenarios presented to participants in the social scenario localization task

Bereavement/Birth
The death of your mother The birth of your child

Romantic rejection/acceptance
The person you love breaks up with you The person you like tells you (s) he is in love with you

Exclusion/Inclusion
You are not invited to a dinner to which you expected to be invited You are invited to a party to which you did not expect to be invited 334 Therefore, in order to disentangle meaningful and spurious correlations, we 335 also calculated the same correlation coefficients among basic emotions (Fig 6). Basic  Table 2).
357  (Fig 2), but even more striking when 18 382 looking at the overlapped maps (Fig 3). In the same fashion, the persistent activation reported in the heart/chest area 407 across positive and negative scenarios is not surprising as it might reflect the link 408 between the representation of these scenarios and the increase in heart rate, 409 commonly experience for both positive and negative emotional states. Accordingly, 410 previous work has shown the association between increased heart rate and both 411 positive and negative emotions like anger, anxiety, fear and sadness on one hand, and 412 with happiness, joy and anticipated pleasure (31). Also, increased heart rate has been 413 found as one of the main response of distress following social rejection (16)

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Emotional experiences in general are strongly associated with bodily 429 sensations reflecting changes in neuroendocrine, skeletomuscular, and autonomic