Have you ever felt green with envy? How about tickled pink? Did some yellow-bellied scoundrel make you see red today? Human beings have a history of using hues to describe emotional states, but new research puts that colorful language to the test.

Using color, Finnish researchers recently set out to determine whether there is a consistent connection between how certain emotions make us feel in various parts of our bodies.

To do so, they showed 700 research participants from various geographical locations two silhouettes of the human body and then exposed them to different emotional stimuli: books, movies, storytelling, facial expressions, et cetera. The researchers did this for 14 different emotions, including love, disgust, depression and anxiety.

The participants were then asked to color in the regions of the silhouettes where they felt increased or decreased activity as a result of the emotional stimuli. The researchers used the results to create a composite silhouette for each emotion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, emotions like happiness and love show a flood of oranges and reds throughout the body, while depression is entirely light dark to blue. For anxiety, the red and yellows are delegated to the chest and stomach, while sadness is represented by blue limbs and a cluster of red in the chest. Almost every emotion included activity increasing or decreasing in the head area.

So what are the implications? If an emotion can trigger — or be triggered by — corresponding bodily sensations, we may be able to consciously affect how we feel. Awareness of these bodily changes could be used to elicit or downplay emotions — or even treat mood disorders such as depression and anxiety. Talk about a golden opportunity!