Recent research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that political emotions are not just abstract thoughts, but distinctly felt physical experiences that shape engagement in democracy. This study provides evidence that people physically experience politically-driven emotions differently than they experience everyday emotions. These physical sensations reliably predict whether someone will actually participate in political actions such as voting or protesting.
Scientists recognize that emotions drive political engagement and public division. However, how people physically experience these emotions remains largely unknown in political science. Political sentiment is typically measured by asking people to rate their feelings on a simple numerical scale. This approach treats emotions as isolated mental states.
The authors of this study argue that physical sensations are at the core of all emotional experiences. When people feel emotions, they experience an interoceptive state in which the brain internally recognizes signals from within the body, such as the pounding of the heart or the nervousness of the stomach. The researchers wanted to map these self-perceived physical emotions, known as somatosensory experiences, to see how states of political anger and political hope actually feel in the human body.
Andrea Wik, a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Holloway Center for the Politics of Emotion and the London School of Advanced Studies, helped lead the research. She explained how her academic background inspired the project.
“It all started during my master’s degree, when I took Dr. Bart Bakker’s political psychology course at the University of Amsterdam. I became fascinated with the question of how emotions shape political behavior,” Vik told Cypost. “At the same time, I became interested in the role of the body in all of this. Our physiology tells us things that self-reports don’t. Then Professor Manos Tsaris, who heads the Center for the Politics of Emotion and is the senior author of this paper, introduced me to the emBODY tool, a body mapping method. And things just clicked.”
Understanding these bodily sensations can reveal how political context alters basic psychological responses. To investigate these physical patterns, researchers conducted a study with 992 adult participants in the United States. The sample was designed to be nationally representative in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, and political affiliation. The median age of the participants was 46 years, and exactly 50% of the group were women.
The scientists measured the physical response using a validated digital mapping technique called the emBODY tool. During the experiment, participants observed a digital silhouette of a human body and used coloring tools to pinpoint where they felt physical sensations. They painted areas red to indicate increased activation, such as warmth or tension, and used blue to indicate decreased activation, such as numbness or physical heaviness.
First, participants completed a mapping task of five everyday nonpolitical emotions, including anger, anxiety, depression, disgust, and hope. Later in the study, participants repeated the exact same mapping process for political versions of these five emotions. For political emotions, participants were asked to select from a list of contemporary political issues that made them personally feel a certain emotion before coloring their body silhouettes. They also rated the overall intensity of their emotional response on a numerical scale from 0 to 100.
Body Map revealed that adding political context to an emotion changes how that emotion is physically experienced. For example, feeling depressed on a daily basis tends to cause numbness and decreased activity in the arms and legs. In contrast, political depression showed a more widespread pattern of physical activity throughout the body.
Political disgust produced a very different physical map from everyday disgust. Everyday aversions, such as the natural physical reaction to rotten food, tend to feel heavy in the stomach and throat. When participants mapped their political disgust, the physical sensation was very similar to anger, with high activation concentrated in the head and upper body.
Vik noted that this finding stood out during the analysis. “For this project, we only pre-registered our research questions because we had no strong predictions about whether politics would change the embodied characteristics of emotions. It would have been meaningful in either direction whether political emotions were similar or different,” she says.
“So I was struck by how the political context changed the embodiment of emotion, and in particular how disgust changed from something like simple pathogen avoidance (like a reaction to something physically disgusting) to something closer to moral outrage,” continued Vik. “I think that change is important because it suggests that the political context doesn’t just strengthen or weaken emotions; it can fundamentally change the kinds of emotions you’re experiencing.”
Other emotions showed more subtle changes or remained more or less similar to everyday emotions. Political hope is less physically activated than everyday hope, probably because political hope is mixed with feelings of hostility toward political opponents. Political anxiety was generally similar to everyday anxiety, but with slightly less feeling in the stomach and more toward mental alertness.
Scientists also investigated how individuals’ political differences affect these physical sensations. Political party affiliation changed the physical experience of these emotions. Democratic-leaning participants reported stronger bodily sensations of negative political emotions compared to Republican-leaning participants. When it came to political anger, anxiety, depression, and disgust, Democratic-leaning people had much higher physical activation, which was primarily concentrated in the head and upper body.
When studying how these physical emotions influence real-world behavior, researchers found a strong link to democratic participation. The physical intensity of political emotions and their physical spread throughout the body can reliably predict whether a person will engage in actual political activity. These activities include voting in elections, signing petitions, posting advocacy messages online, and participating in public protests.
Interestingly, the physical intensity of political emotions did not predict emotional polarization. Emotional polarization refers to an intense emotional dislike or distrust of people who belong to the opposing political party. This suggests that physical impulses of political emotion drive people to civic action, rather than simply hating the other side.
“I hope this work gives people time to think about how their emotions are embodied and how politics shapes them,” Vic said. “We tend to think of political sentiment as simply a measure of how angry we are on a scale of 1 to 10, but sentiment is more than just a number.”
“They are felt and alive through your body: the butterflies in your stomach, the tension in your chest, the heaviness in your limbs,” Vic added. “What we found is that politics alters bodily experiences of anger, anxiety, disgust, and hope. And what actually drives people to participate may be their embodied experiences, not the numbers on a survey. We find that our bodies are part of politics, too.”
While this study provides extensive evidence about how we physically feel politics, the authors acknowledge that their findings have some limitations. This study relies on a cross-sectional design. That is, the data was collected at a single point in time. For this reason, scientists are unable to definitively prove that physical sensations of emotion directly cause political behavior.
Vik emphasized that the results should be interpreted with caution. “We want to be careful not to overstate the effects. This is an early study and the findings should be interpreted as such,” Vik said. “There are some important limitations to our study. Achieving true equivalence in emotional intensity across political and non-political contexts is inherently difficult, and given the salience of partisan identity, the U.S. context may represent a particularly strong case, requiring a longitudinal design to establish the direction of causality. However, I urge readers to view them as directionality rather than deal-breakers.”
Despite these caveats, the researchers said understanding physical emotional responses could reshape political science. “I think the practical importance is real,” Vik said. “If political emotions are embodied, and if that embodiment shapes political behavior in ways that are not captured by self-reported intensity, then that has real implications for how we study political emotions in the future. The inequalities in the experience, who comes to feel it, who learns not to feel it, whose embodied responses are suppressed or ignored, are not simply individual, if they depend in part on how they are felt.
“They are political,” she added. “They shape who acts and whose voice is heard. Democracy may depend more on what people can feel than what they think.”
The concept of “ideological bodies” is one area where the authors call for attention. “The finding that I think is most easily misinterpreted is what we call the ‘ideological body,’ the pattern in which Democratic-leaning participants reported stronger and more widespread physical sensations of negative political feelings than Republican-leaning participants,” Vick said.
“Some may read this as suggesting that some groups are more emotional and therefore less rational. This notion has long been debunked, but it stubbornly persists. I want to get ahead of it. More or less embodying emotion says nothing about your rationality or moral character.”
“What it reflects is that our political worldview is implicitly reflected not only in how we think, but also in how we feel about the world from within,” she continued. “Our case selection and research design are also important here. Partisan cleavages may be particularly pronounced in the United States, and the Democratic Party was the ‘election loser’ at the time of data collection, so we do not know how this result would hold in other contexts.”
In the future, the research team plans to expand its focus to a variety of demographic and social issues. “A very concrete next step is a project about how young people experience relative deprivation in their bodies, the sense that their group is unfairly inferior to other groups, and how this influences violent extremism,” Vik said.
“My long-term goal is to build a more complete picture of how political emotions exist in both our brains and bodies, and how they shape our politics,” Vik said. “We look forward to seeing that knowledge used in ways that are relevant to evidence-based communication, analysis and policy, including building people’s emotional resilience, resilience to radicalization, and knowledge resilience to combat misinformation.”
“And perhaps most importantly, I hope that I can somehow contribute to a society that is better able to channel emotions and frustrations into something more constructive, into participation rather than disillusionment, and into something positive for both individuals and our democracy.”
The study, “Embodied Politics: How Politics Shape and Be Shaped by the Bodily Experience of Emotions,” was authored by Andrea Vik, Alejandro Gálvez-Pol, Sohi Park, and Manos Tsakiris.
