The Relationship Between Mind, Brain, and Body Regarding Emotion

We are moved by the situations before us, predictions of the future, recollections of the past, and even unrealistic fantasies, and we understand these sensations as emotions. So, how do emotions emerge in the mind? And where do these individual differences come from? In our laboratory, we attempt to understand these questions through the relationship between the workings of the mind, the brain, and the body. Based on the assumption that changes in activities such as heart rate and respiration that occur simultaneously when feeling strong emotions do not only appear as a result of mental activity, but that the perception of these changes itself influences the content and vividness of the emotion, we conduct research using psychology and cognitive neuroscience methods to observe brain activity associated with mental movement.

Specifically, we investigate whether people who easily feel emotions such as anxiety, or conversely, people who have difficulty feeling their own emotions, have specific characteristics in how they perceive bodily responses associated with emotion, and whether there is brain activity related to those characteristics. To this end, we sometimes use machines that simultaneously measure multiple autonomic nervous system activities or machines for observing brain activity. We also use questionnaires and interviews to investigate the characteristics of how individuals feel emotions, attempting to find relationships with the body and brain activity. Recently, we have also been conducting research from the perspective of whether training to change the perception of bodily responses or changes in the aforementioned brain activity causes changes in how emotions are felt or in mood states.

We hope to unravel the connection between the mind and body using scientific methods and to advance our understanding of that relationship, even if only little by little.