Watching a movie can awaken many emotions in a person. Horror ones, for example, usually give butterflies and disgust, and there is a scientific explanation for this. A study by researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italyshows that there is a strong connection between the brain’s response to threatening situations and gut reactions.
It’s as if the gastric system prepares itself for the worst in situations of fear and disgust by reducing the pH of the intestine to make it more acidic, causing the feeling of nausea.
The study led by psychologist Giuseppina Porciello was published in a pre-print version in plataforma bioRxiv in February. It still needs to be reviewed by the scientific community.
The analysis involved the participation of 31 healthy men, with no diagnosis of psychological, neurological or digestive disorders. They were instructed to swallow a smart pill containing a sensor, a battery and a wireless transmitter to give researchers information regarding what happens inside the human body when we are exposed to different sensations.
The equipment was designed to measure acidity, temperature and pressure inside the digestive system – in the stomach, small intestine and large intestine – while the scientists measured the system’s muscular electrical activity on the outside.
With the pills properly positioned, participants were asked to watch nine-second video clips over four sessions. The videos had content that was happy, disgusting, sad, scary, and “neutral emotive” to serve as a comparison. At the end, they should answer a questionnaire regarding how they felt.
Gastric sensations increased considerably during the fear scenes, peaking when participants watched videos that aroused disgust. Breathing was also elevated, just like during the sad scenes.
At the same time, researchers noticed that the digestive system released more stomach acid. The more disgust or fear the men felt, the lower and more acidic the pH.
“Our findings support somatic theories of emotions, suggesting that specific patterns of physiological signals are linked to unique emotional states and are in line with behavioral and neural evidence that highlight the discrete structure of emotions,” says the psychologist in the article.
Giuseppina acknowledges research limitations, such as the number of volunteers, who were all of the same sex. However, she believes that this data might be used in the future to better understand intestinal and digestive disorders and how they affect the human mind.
“Our approach can be adopted when studying the contribution of gastric signals in people who have dysfunctional emotional processing, such as autism spectrum conditions and depression”, believes Giuseppina.
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