Have you ever felt like there was a pit in your stomach? What about a flutter in your heart?
It turns out that the anatomical connections we make with certain emotions and feelings — what researchers call embodied emotions — may be more universal than you’d think. In fact, people have been making very similar statements about their bodies for about 3,000 years.
In a new study published in iScience, researchers catalogued words for body parts and emotions used by people who lived in Mesopotamia between 934 and 612 BCE, in what is now a region that includes Egypt, Iraq, and Türkiye. Then, they compared those ancient ideas etched on clay tablets and other artifacts to commonly used modern-day links between emotions and body parts, using bodily maps to visualize the similarities and differences.
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Happiness: Have you ever felt happiness in your… liver? The Mesopotamians did, as you can see from the bright orange spot on this heat map highlighting the body parts frequently mentioned alongside the emotion in ancient (right) and modern (left) sources. Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024 -
Love: The ancients (right) saw love as emanating from one’s liver, knees and heart, the latter of which coincides nicely with how we envision love’s anatomy today (left). Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024 -
Anger: In this heat map, you can see just how differently ancient Mesopotamians (right) thought about anger. The writing most commonly associated anger with the legs and feet, whereas today (left) we experience the emotion in the upper parts of the body. Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024
“We see certain body areas that are still used in similar contexts in modern times,” says Juha Lahnakoski, lead author of the study and a cognitive neuroscientist at Germany’s LVR Clinic Düsseldorf, in an email. “For example, the heart was often mentioned together with positive emotions such as love, pride, and happiness, as we might still say ‘my heart swelled’ with joy or pride.”
These ancients, who lived in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, also tended to associate the stomach with feelings of sadness and distress.
Not everything has carried over from the past. For instance, the Neo-Assyrians saw anger as emanating from their legs. In another example, they strongly associated positive emotions, such as happiness, with the liver.
“This association is largely lost in our current language, but it may not be such a surprise to those who are familiar with ancient cultures,” says Lahnakoski. “The liver was actually considered the seat of the soul in some ancient cultures, perhaps because of its striking size and appearance when looking into an animal or a human body.”
Today, it’s difficult to parse where certain emotional associations originate or how they might bleed from one population into another, through shared texts, religions, or cultural practices. But by looking so deeply into the past to a society divorced from our own by thousands of years, the researchers were able to show an “interesting” amount of correspondence, says Lahnakoski.
Embodied emotions seem “so obviously natural the way we describe them now”, says Lahnakoski, but “we might forget we have grown up in a particular language and cultural environment that may have shaped the very feelings we experience.”
Looking to the past, says Lahnakoski, we can better evaluate which connections are deeply rooted and which, like happiness in the liver, have gone by the wayside.
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