Sensory modality and body-location imagery among persons with somatosensory amplification
Atsushi Okada, Jiro Gyoba · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2019
The purpose of this study was to assess whether somatosensory amplification influenced the relationship between basic emotions and sensory modality and body image by the modality differential (MD) method and the body-image location (BIL) scale.Approximately 130 undergraduate students were administered the Japanese Version of the Somatosensory Amplification Scale (SSAS) and were asked to rate the relevance of 10 sensory modalities (warm, cold, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, pain, equilibrium, kinesthetic, visual, and auditory) and 7 body parts (forehead, throat, chest, stomach, lower abdomen, internal organs, and whole body) to 6 basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust).Participants also completed the Japanese version of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale.Each emotion was compared between the two groups (high and low SSAS) using the MD method and BIL scale.The high SSAS's relevance of sadness, fear, anger, and surprise to the proximal sensory image was stronger than that of the low SSAS.Moreover, the high SSAS's relevance of happiness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust to body location image was stronger than that of the low SSAS.These results suggest that somatosensory amplification strongly influenced the combination of sensory modality and body image with emotion.