Bodily Sensation Maps in the art researchers’ toolbox

Description

Cognitive-corporal theories and the “4E” approach to mind (cf. Burnett & Gallagher, 2020) highlight how emotions are cognitive as well as deeply bodily phenomena as they take place within a feeling body. The same is also true for those emotions that are elicited by art. To access the internal state of the body, researchers must rely on people's self-awareness or sense of it (i.e.: interoception).
Bodily Sensation Maps (BSMs, Nummenmaa et al., 2014) are topographical representations of people’s sensations from their own bodies when experiencing emotions. They are created by asking people to self-report their own bodily activity by pinpointing it into two empty body silhouettes. One is used to report where in the body they felt increased activity (activations), whereas the other reports bodily activity becoming weaker (deactivations) in relation to an emotional event. BSMs have been used in research concerning different topics and populations.
Results from our previous study (Schino et al., 2021) demonstrated that BSMs are also a resourceful form of subjective reportage to investigate the interoception of basic and complex emotions elicited by new media visual art (i.e.: digital paintings). In this presentation, we will explore three studies as examples of the application of BSMs to a wide variety of research questions, settings, and art forms. Namely, (1) the online validation study of BSMs as biomarkers of bodily sensations elicited by new media visual art, (2) an online study where BSMs constitute a measure for the affective empathy evoked by the cross-modal interaction of music with movie scenes, (3) an in-situ study that employed BSMs to grasp differences in terms of self-awareness of bodily changes elicited by VR and physical art installations. Through discussion of these empirical cases, this talk will present how BSMs can constitute a valid measure indicative of embodied emotions during art appreciation.

Periode	31-aug.-2022
Evenementstitel	2022 Biennial Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics
Evenementstype	Conference
Locatie	Philadelphia, United States, PennsylvaniaToon op kaart
Mate van erkenning	International