You’re all dolled up for an interview, and you start sweating bullets through your not-so-comfortable business suit. Your palms are so sweaty you’re embarrassed to shake a potential employer’s hand. Or, maybe you look across the bar at your favorite watering hole and see your crush sipping a pint. Suddenly, a million butterflies gather, flying around in your stomach as your skin turns flush. We know from our own experience that emotions can be felt physically in the body and experts contend that these reactions are largely universal across all cultures. But whether our hearts race in fear or our cheeks turn red in embarrassment, what causes emotions to manifest in the body?
Lauri Nummenmaa is a molecular neuroscientist who leads the Human Emotion Systems lab at Turku PET Centre in Finland. His team was famously able to map emotions in the body – first, by eliciting emotions in individuals ...
