Visual experience shapes bodily representation of emotion

Philosophers and experimentalists have long debated whether bodily representation of emotion is grounded in our sensory experience. Indeed, we are used to observe emotional reactions expressed through the bodies of others, yet it is still unknown whether this observation influences how we experience affective states in our own bodies. To delve into this question, we developed a naturalistic haptic task and asked a group of early ( = 20) and late ( = 20) blind, as well as sighted individuals ( = 20) to indicate where in the body they perceive changes associated with affective states. Our results show that visual experience shapes bodily representation of emotion. Blind and sighted individuals attribute different importance to body regions in relation to specific emotional states, as sighted people focus more on visceral sensations, while blind report as more relevant the mouth and the hand areas. We also observe differences in the coherence of bodily maps of specific emotions, such as aggressiveness, for which early and late blind are homogenous in reporting the mouth, while sighted subjects demonstrate a scattered pattern of activation across the body. Finally, our findings show that blind people rely on a different organization of affect, as only sighted categorize bodily maps of emotion through the valence and arousal dimensions. In summary, we demonstrate that sensory experience impacts the bodily representation of affect by modulating the relevance that different body parts have in emotional reactions, modifying the weights attributed to interoceptive and exteroceptive signals, and changing how emotions are conceptualized in the body. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).