large and convincing studies that statistically combine the results reported by multiple experiments find no neat, recurrent “bodily fingerprints” for the different emotional states we seem to experience. There is no single set of bodily responses that is unique to sadness, or shame, or any of the many emotional states we name in daily life. Instead, emotional experience seems to be constructed, moment by moment, from a mixture of cultural influences, evidence and expectations about my current situation and my own current bodily states, and my own idiosyncratic tendencies (“individual
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