emBODY
The topographical self-report tool developed by Nummenmaa’s group (open-sourced at version.aalto.fi/gitlab/eglerean/embody) and the instrument behind the “bodily maps of emotions” literature. It produces bodily-sensation-maps.
What kind of measure this is
emBODY sits in an unusual place among this wiki’s methods, and placing it correctly is most of the interpretive work.
The heartbeat-detection-task measures accuracy — performance against a physiological ground truth. maia measures sensibility — beliefs about one’s own interoceptive style. self-report-physiology-congruence measures coherence — the within-person correspondence between report and physiology. emBODY has no ground truth and no correspondence term: it measures the content and spatial structure of what is felt, taking the report at face value. On the interoceptive-taxonomy, it is closest to sensibility, but sensibility about a state rather than about a trait.
This is a deliberate trade, stated plainly by its authors: focusing on “the output layer of these functions — the subjectively felt bodily changes — circumvents [the weak self-report/physiology coupling] even though it sacrifices the physiological specificity.” The gain is that emotion-specific structure appears where general-level autonomic recording has struggled to find it. The cost is that finding structure in emBODY data says nothing about whether the body did anything.
The word-cue problem
The standard administration presents an emotion word. Any concordance across subjects, sexes, or cultures is therefore compatible with two very different explanations: they feel the same things, or they know the same things about where emotions belong. The literature’s answer is Nummenmaa et al. (2014)‘s report that word-cued maps match maps produced after nonverbal emotion induction — worth noting is a claim inherited by citation in later papers rather than re-tested in them, including in volynets-2020-cultural-universality, where it carries considerable weight (see cultural-universality-of-emotion).
Lyons et al. (2021) weaken the worry without dissolving it. Their induction was pictures (IAPS), not words, and emotion-specific maps came out anyway at accuracies matching the original — the first replication in this wiki that does not run through a verbal cue. But a picture selected to depict disgust is still a token of a shared emotion category, so the constructionist can reply that conceptual knowledge was cued pictorially rather than lexically. What the result does rule out is the narrowest version of the objection, that the maps are an artifact of reading an emotion word. The general version — that subjects report where the category says the feeling belongs — survives it.
Beyond emotion
The same tool has been applied to social touch topography (Suvilehto et al. 2015), erogenous zones (Nummenmaa et al. 2016), subjective feelings generally (Nummenmaa et al. 2018), and psychopathology.
The psychopathology strand is the one with the most upside for the method, because it has produced a double dissociation on a single instrument: maps are undifferentiated between emotions in schizophrenia (Torregrossa et al. 2018) but well differentiated in depression, where what changes instead is the activation/deactivation balance (lyons-2021-body-maps-depression). An instrument that separates two disorders in two different ways is doing more than recording folk knowledge about where emotions live — the strongest indirect answer yet to the word-cue problem above, since shared concepts of “sadness” should not fracture along diagnostic lines.