Body Awareness & Affective Experience

Body sensations, such as heartbeats, breathing, or sensations from the stomach or gut, have been shown to be important for the experience of emotions. Here, across two studies, we looked at the extent to which people’s feelings differed throughout daily life depending on how aware they were of their body sensations in the same moment. To do this, we surveyed participants multiple times per day at random times via their smartphone for 4 weeks (Study 1) or one week (Study 2). For each survey, we asked them about their awareness of their body sensations as well as how pleasant/unpleasant they felt and how activated/deactivated/deactivated they felt. We found that in moments when people reported being more aware of their body, they were also feeling more unpleasant and activated emotionally than usual for them. Findings suggest that people’s awareness of or attention to their body fluctuates moment to moment throughout daily life and may be heightened at times when something is ‘wrong’ (ex. feeling ill or hungry) or when something is otherwise different from usual, such as when feeling more activated or worked-up.

Our results show that people are more aware of sensations from their body when they are feeling more unpleasant or more activated than usual for them throughout their daily life. Most prior research has focused on awareness of body sensations as an individual difference, something that is stable for a person over time, but we show that it fluctuates from moment to moment throughout daily life and that these fluctuations track how you are feeling in real time. This has important implications for developing real-time interventions, such as trying to focus attention away from the body at times when people are feeling down or overly activated, such as prompting a check-in with support or resources at times when body awareness is unusually heightened. Drawing attention or awareness toward the body could also potentially help boost activation when people are feeling low energy, which may be helpful in workplace settings where sustained attentiveness is critical to performance, such as for factory workers, security guards, or radiologists screening ultrasound or mammogram films.

Through this set of studies, I aided in both the design and implementation of ecological momentary assessment (experience sampling) designs. I also cleaned and analyzed the data, and presented the results as a publication. Within the data analysis, I utilized multi-level linear regression modeling approaches, correlational approaches, ANOVAs, and t-tests. I also had the opportunity to use natural language processing of the current thoughts provided by participants. Within the NLP approach, I used R for text cleaning and preparation, and designed a Python pipeline to compare our texts to a normed lexicon. Please see the publication for more details.