Embodied Emotions in Ancient Neo-Assyrian Texts Revealed by Bodily Mapping of Emotional Semantics

Abstract

Autonomic activity during emotions is subjectively felt in the body via interoceptive and somatosensory pathways resulting in emotion specific bodily sensations. Here we utilized this relationship and computational linguistic methods to map a representation of emotions in ancient texts. We analysed Neo-Assyrian texts from 934–612 BCE to discern consistent relationships between linguistic expressions related to both emotions and bodily sensations. We then computed statistical regularities between emotion terms and words referring to body parts, and back-projected the resulting emotion body part relationships on a standard body template, yielding bodily sensation maps for the emotions. We found consistent embodied patterns for eighteen distinct emotions. Hierarchical clustering revealed four main clusters of bodily emotion categories, two clusters of mainly positive emotions, one large cluster of mainly negative emotions and one of empathy and schadenfreude. These results reveal the historical use of embodied language pertaining to human emotions. Our data-driven tool projecting emotional lexical spaces on a human body provides a novel method for comparing textual embodiment patterns across different languages and cultures across time.