Emotional body representations: more pronounced effect of hands at a more explicit level of awareness.

To understand conditions such as body dysmorphic disorder, we need to understand healthy individuals' perceptual, conceptual, and emotional representations of their bodies. Not much is known about the differences in these representations across body districts, for example, hands, feet, and whole-body, despite their differences at sensory and functional levels. To understand this, we developed more implicit and explicit measures of body satisfaction for these body districts.

Normal or tingly? A story about hands and feet.

Aims: Spontaneous sensations (SPS) are sensations that are felt in the body in the absence of external stimulation. The literature on SPS has used explicit measures, such as questionnaires to explore SPS, while no studies to date have examined SPS on an implicit level. This study was conducted to collect representative stimuli that can be used to build such a task, for example, an Implicit Association Test.