"Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples."
Personally, I agree with the author. I work with various Emotional Release techniques, and they ultimately lead to crying as release for me as well. It took effort, and time, to connect to my emotions in such a way to actually notice how intense the bodily sensations are. If you don't practice, the brain seems to filter the sensations and leaves you with only bits of information, if any.
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Source for the "body map of emotions": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24379370/
"Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples."
Personally, I agree with the author. I work with various Emotional Release techniques, and they ultimately lead to crying as release for me as well. It took effort, and time, to connect to my emotions in such a way to actually notice how intense the bodily sensations are. If you don't practice, the brain seems to filter the sensations and leaves you with only bits of information, if any.