Body Language

A pang in your heart. Butterflies in your stomach. A lump in your throat.

Humans use these widespread expressions, or “emotional semantics” to express anatomical connections with certain emotions and feelings, or as researchers say, “embodied emotions.”

Now, researchers say they are more universal than we think, not only traversing geography and culture but also time itself, according to a new study. Scientists say that people have been making similar statements about their bodies and feelings for about 3,000 years.

“If you compare the ancient Mesopotamian bodily map of happiness with modern bodily maps, it is largely similar, with the exception of a notable glow in the liver,” said cognitive neuroscientist Juha Lahnakoski, lead author of the study.

To arrive at this conclusion, researchers studied a large body of texts to find out how people in the ancient Mesopotamian region (modern-day Iraq) experienced emotions in their bodies thousands of years ago, analyzing one million words of the ancient Akkadian language from 934-612 BCE in the form of cuneiform scripts on clay tablets.

They then compared these words with commonly utilized modern-day links between emotions and body parts and used bodily-heat maps to visualize the similarities and differences between the two time periods.

They found many similarities, the researchers said. For example, the heart was often mentioned together with positive emotions such as love, pride, and happiness, as in ‘my heart swelled’ with pride. “On some level, then,” he said, “there is also cross-cultural similarity regarding where human beings feel happiness, even if they’re separated by nearly 3,000 years.”

The ancient Mesopotamians, living in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, also associated the stomach with feelings of sadness and distress that correspond with modern-day phrases like “gut-wrenching” or a “pit in your stomach.”

While the heat maps showed many similarities across the two time periods, the researchers also discovered some differences. For example, the Neo-Assyrians saw anger as emanating from their feet. Another difference was how the ancient people used the liver and knees in association with happiness.

The researchers said those associations have been lost to our modern languages. However, in ancient times, the liver was actually considered the seat of the soul.

Embodied emotions seem “so obviously natural the way we describe them now,” said Lahnakoski, adding that that is due to growing up in a particular language and cultural environment that may have shaped how we describe those feelings.

“It means the experience of happy emotions might not be as universal as is often assumed,” he said. “Just think: If you lived in the ancient Near East, perhaps rather than your heart swelling with joy, your liver would have been flaming with delight instead.”