The Relationship between the Mind, Brain, and Body in Emotion

2023/10/16

We can experience emotions such as happiness, sadness, and anger, whether we are communicating with someone or thinking alone. We are emotionally moved by the situation before us, our predictions for the future, recollections of the past, and even unrealistic fantasies, and we understand these sensations as emotions.

So, how do emotions emerge in our minds? And where do individual differences come from? In our laboratory, we are attempting to understand these questions by examining the relationship between the functions of the mind, brain, and body. We conduct research using methods from psychology and cognitive neuroscience, which observes brain activity associated with mental processes. Our work is based on the hypothesis that the changes in bodily activities like heart rate and respiration that occur when we feel strong emotions are not just a result of mental processes; the very act of perceiving these changes influences the content and vividness of the emotions themselves.

Specifically, we are investigating whether people who are prone to feeling emotions like anxiety, or conversely, those who have difficulty feeling their own emotions, have distinct ways of perceiving the bodily responses that accompany emotions, and whether there is related brain activity. For this purpose, we sometimes use equipment that simultaneously measures multiple autonomic nervous system activities and machines for observing brain activity. We also examine the characteristics of an individual's emotional experience using questionnaires and interviews. Recently, we have also been conducting research from the perspective of whether training to change the perception of bodily responses, or changes in the aforementioned brain activity, can cause changes in how emotions are felt or in mood states.

Even without specialized knowledge or research methods, we intuitively believe that the mind and body are connected. We hope to unravel this intuitive belief using scientific methods and gradually advance our understanding of the relationship between the mind and body.

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of the interview.