This project investigates the relationship between emotion, the body, and subjective experience from an embodied neurophenomenological perspective. From this approach, emotions are not understood solely as processes occurring within the brain, but as lived experiences that emerge through the dynamic interaction between brain, body, and the particular way in which individuals experience and make sense of a given situation. Emotions are therefore considered situated and embodied phenomena, shaped by ongoing interactions between physiological states, bodily regulation, perception, and subjective experience.
The study examines healthy young adults, healthy older adults, and older adults living with Parkinson’s disease, with the aim of understanding how emotional processes are related to postural regulation and bodily control across different stages of adulthood and in the context of neurological disease. Participants are exposed to a range of emotionally meaningful situations while objective changes in their posture and bodily dynamics are recorded. Following these experimental conditions, first-person interviews are conducted to explore how participants experienced the situation from their own perspective, including what they felt emotionally, how they experienced their bodies, and what meaning they attributed to their experience.
A central innovation of the project is the integration of third-person and first-person perspectives within a single methodological framework. The third-person perspective provides objective measures of bodily and behavioural changes, while the first-person perspective focuses on the lived experience of those changes. Rather than treating these dimensions as independent sources of information, the neurophenomenological approach seeks to examine how observable bodily dynamics relate to the way those dynamics are experienced and interpreted by the individual. This allows the project to investigate together phenomena that have traditionally been studied separately: what happens in the body and how that bodily experience is lived from within.
This approach also makes it possible to examine individual differences in emotional experience and bodily regulation, recognising that the same emotional situation may be experienced and embodied differently across individuals. By combining quantitative measures of postural behaviour with qualitative accounts of lived experience, the project seeks to capture both the measurable dynamics of the body and the experiential meaning of those dynamics.
More broadly, the project aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of emotion as an embodied, situated, and experiential phenomenon. In particular, it investigates how the relationship between body, emotion, and subjective experience changes across healthy ageing and in Parkinson’s disease. By examining these processes across different populations, the project seeks to clarify how changes in bodily control and regulation may shape emotional experience, while also considering how emotional engagement may, in turn, influence bodily dynamics. Ultimately, this work aims to demonstrate the value of integrating physiological and behavioural measurements with first-person experience to better understand the complex interplay between brain, body, and lived experience.
