Psychosomatics

Emotions (from Latin emoveo - to shock, to excite) are subjective reactions of humans and higher animals to any external and internal stimuli. Emotions accompany all processes of human activity and can be caused by situations or events that exist only in our imagination.

 Scientists from different countries, studying the influence of emotions on human health, have come to very interesting conclusions. Thus, a famous English neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington, a Nobel Prize winner, has established the following pattern: the first emotional experience occurs, followed by vegetative and somatic changes in the body.

 Interesting are the results of a study by Finnish scientists that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (http://www.pnas.org/), where the scientists point out that in a survey of 773 respondents, they asked people to indicate what makes them feel certain emotionally charged material.

Scientists say that those people who felt shame, for example, colored their cheeks yellow, and those who felt disgusted colored their abdominal area red. The state of depression makes human limbs less susceptible to external stimuli (blue), and the emotion of sadness is concentrated, according to the chart, in the eye area.

Even though Finnish and Taiwanese respondents, i.e. representatives of two very different cultural groups, took part in the survey, almost all participants made the same maps of human emotions. 

• Interesting is the correspondence between subjects' diagnoses and their emotion maps. For example, kidney problems were present in those subjects who had feelings of fear and insecurity.
• Bronchopulmonary system diagnoses were in subjects prone to frequent bouts of sadness and grief.
• Cardiovascular diagnoses were found in the group of subjects prone to depression. And liver disease diagnoses were found in the group of subjects prone to frequent anger and resentment.