Body Awareness & Emotional Intensity

Emotional intensity refers to the extent to which one experiences an emotion. Different from affective arousal (which refers to how activated one feels within their body), high emotional intensity can occur with both low arousal emotions (such as sadness) and high arousal emotions (such as excitement).

Here, I was interested in how subjective experience of the body (body awareness) related to emotional intensity. To do this, we conducted an experience sampling study in which participants were asked to answer short surveys on their phones across a 7-day period asking about their current awareness of their body and the extent to which they experienced 16 different emotions. I found that for the majority of the emotions we measured, when participants were experiencing heightened emotional intensity, they also tended to be more aware of their body within that moment. These results add evidence towards the connection between awareness of the body and emotional experience.

Through this study, I aided in the cleaning and analysis of the data, and presented the results as a publication. Within the data analysis, I utilized multi-level linear regression modeling approaches. Please see the publication for more details.