Study Links Perceived Location of Self to Thinking Style

A study published by researchers at North Dakota State University examined how people locate their sense of self within the body. Participants were asked to point to the part of their body that best represented the core of their being. Most respondents selected either the head or the heart.

Those who selected the head described themselves as more rational and logical, while those who selected the heart described themselves as more emotionally driven.

In the first set of studies, head-locators scored higher on tests of general knowledge. Heart-locators reported feeling worse in stressful situations. The researchers also found that participants' self-reported locations predicted their scores on measures of rational and emotional thinking one year later.

A follow-up study with 455 participants asked individuals to estimate how much of their self would be in the brain or heart while performing different activities. People tended to locate the self in the head during academic tasks and in the heart when analyzing feelings.

Those who reported greater flexibility in shifting their perceived self-location scored higher on the American College Testing assessment and on the North Dakota Emotional Abilities Test.

The researchers link these results to dual process theory, which posits two mental systems: one for slow, deliberative thinking and another for intuitive responses. They propose that the perceived location of the self reflects which system is active.

Michael D. Robinson stated that learning to shift the perceived self-location might require meditation or body-focused attention exercises. A small 2013 experiment found that touching the temple increased rational responses to moral dilemmas, while touching the chest increased intuitive responses.

The same experiment reported that shifting from heart to head location improved performance on true-or-false tests of general knowledge by approximately nine percentage points.