What is it about?
Where do you feel your "self" in your body? Some people sense their "I" in the head, behind the eyes; others in the chest, around the heart. We asked whether this everyday, often unnoticed sense of self-location relates to how connected people feel to themselves, to others, and to the wider world. We surveyed 218 U.S. adults who had all experienced a strong emotional connection with someone. Because asking "Where is your ‘I’?" directly is loaded with cultural meaning, we built a new questionnaire asking where in the body people feel caring, closeness, empathy, or decision-making. It identified clear "head-locators" and "heart-locators" (few people placed it anywhere else), and about 90% of them then pointed to the same area on a body map. Heart-locators felt more connected to themselves and to the world at large (nature, humanity, life as a whole) and described their connections as warmer and more heartfelt. Head-locators felt less connected to themselves and the world and saw themselves as more separate and independent, relating more through thinking and decision-making than through felt emotion. Yet they were just as respectful and appreciative of others, and the two groups did not differ in how connected they felt to other people, including partners, family, and friends.
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Why is it important?
Psychology usually studies connection within relationships between people (social, work, community). This study shows that connection is also tied to other planes, notably something bodily and often overlooked: where we feel our "self" to be. It is the first study to link a head- or heart-located self (the two most commonly reported self-locations) to the felt sense of connection, and it introduces a new tool, the Dispositional Self-Location Questionnaire, which measures self-location indirectly. The findings suggest that "living from the heart" describes a real bodily experience, not just a figure of speech. Since people can learn to shift where they attend from, future studies can test whether moving attention from head to heart helps restore a sense of connection (for example, in social anxiety) or a sense of meaning and purpose. The study shows an association, not cause and effect.
Perspectives
This article grew out of my doctoral research on what happens when the self "dwells in the heart." For centuries, poets, mystics, and lovers have described a warm, expanding feeling in the chest when they feel at one with another person, with nature, with the world, or with other dimensions. I wanted to know whether this is only a metaphor or a measurable lived experience. It struck me that head-locators were not cold or disconnected: they related through respect and appreciation, while heart-locators additionally felt connection as something warm and bodily, a resonance that reached beyond people to life itself. This raises further questions, such as how meaning or resonance can be measured. I hope this work invites readers to notice where they experience themselves from, since how connected we feel may depend partly on where our attention comes from.
Marie Sester
California Institute of Integral Studies
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: How self-location predicts the degree and quality of the felt sense of connection., Psychology of Consciousness Theory Research and Practice, November 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/cns0000501.
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