For a Choreography of Emotions: Spatiotemporal Phenomenology.

Abstract

Background: Emotions are a key feature of human life. Despite intensive research, we still do not have a full grasp of the complexity of emotions, such as their peculiar combination of emotional feeling and behavioral motor manifestation. We also lack translational research that links the phenomenal (experiential) with the pre-phenomenal (neurological) levels.

Summary: Operating within the framework of embodiment on experiential and neural levels, we characterize different emotions by their different movements as well as by their distinct experiences of time and space, rather than externally observable behavior. This leads literally to a choreography of emotions and spatiotemporal phenomenology, that is, a characterization of emotions in terms of corporeality, particularly how persons feel that their body moves in space and time and interacts with its environment. That is complemented by an outlook of linking such views of emotions to the brain through what has recently been introduced as "Spatiotemporal Neuroscience," whose theoretical background is briefly sketched and outlined. This is accompanied by an example of the temporal changes, with abnormal slowness being shared by both, experience and brain, as their "common currency" during sadness.

Key message: We here introduce the outline of a choreography of emotions as a descriptive framework that makes reference to the direction and timing of the way persons experience their bodily movement, as well as to the matching of bodily movements and the surrounding lived space, which carries high potential of being directly linked to the brain in a non-reductive way through spatiotemporal neuroscience.