Bodily representation of emotions in blind people

Lettieri, Giada [UCL] Calce, Roberta Pia [UCL] Giraudet, Eléonore [UCL] Collignon, Olivier [UCL]

How do people represent their own and others’ feelings in the body? Associations between affective experiences and the body can come from interoception, language or seeing changes in facial, postural and gestural behavior in people experiencing emotions (Levenson, 2003). To causally address how visual experience impacts how specific affective states are mapped onto discrete body parts, we developed a haptic procedure relying on a miniature human mannequin with a recording camera on top. Twenty early blind (9F) and 20 age-matched sighted (10F) had to indicate with their dominant index finger the parts of the body they felt activated when experiencing 15 positive and 15 negative emotions. A marker was applied to the finger to track their movement such that we obtained for each volunteer and emotion a map of activated regions. Despite important similarities between how blind and sighted people map emotional states onto the body, we also found reliable differences between blind and sighted individuals in the bodily maps of some selective emotions. Specifically, with euphoria, sighted reported bodily sensations in the face and stomach, while blind participants pointed to mouth region only. Similarly, for love, visually-deprived individuals do not report the stomach region, that is prominent in sighted. Overall, our results show that even though reliable bodily representation of emotion can be acquired without visual experience, blind individuals however seem to report more the head region for some specific emotions, suggesting that they retain the communicative and interpersonal role of bodily expressions, but rely less on interoceptive information.