- Key People:
- Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
- Related Topics:
- emotion
feeling
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What is a feeling in psychology?
In psychology, a feeling is the perception of events within the body and is closely related to emotion. Feelings are essentially internal and subjective, so their study concerns how an event is perceived and what the perceived event is.
The amygdala, a structure in the brain, plays a prominent role in mediating emotional learning and behavior. Emotions possess a valence, whether positive or negative, and an intensity that reflects emotional arousal. Emotions influence cognitive processes such as attention, memory formation, and decision-making, and they play a prominent role in social behavior.
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How are feelings different from emotions?
In psychology, feelings are understood as the perception of events within the body and are closely related to emotion. Emotions are heterogeneous, encompassing a wide variety of psychological phenomena, from specific to general and brief to protracted.
Psychologists disagree on the use of the term feeling. Some equate feeling to states of pleasantness and unpleasantness, known as affect. Emotions influence cognitive processes such as attention, memory formation, and decision-making, and they play a prominent role in social behavior.
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What are some common types of feelings?
Feelings, closely related to emotion, involve the perception of events within the body. Emotions are diverse, ranging from specific feelings towards a person or situation to general states like joy or distress. They can be brief or long-lasting, and have physical, behavioral, and neural structures.
Psychologists categorize emotions as positive or negative, though this is an oversimplification, as emotions like anger can have positive effects depending on the context. The study of emotion spans across multiple disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, and sociology, highlighting its complexity.
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How do psychologists study and measure feelings?
Psychologists use diverse research methods to study and measure feelings, or emotions. These methods include questionnaires, self-reports, interviews, and direct observation. Bodily responses, such as pupil dilation and blood pressure, can reveal a person’s feelings, and technological advances allow continuous monitoring of physiological states like heartbeat and blood volume, correlating them with psychological conditions such as stress.
Emotions are complex, varying in specificity, duration, physical expression, and conscious experience. Researchers often categorize emotions as positive or negative, though this is an oversimplification. The study of facial expressions, like the Duchenne smile, helps differentiate sincere emotions from false ones. Verbal expressions, from spontaneous cheers to articulate orations, also provide insight into feelings.
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How can feelings affect our thoughts and actions?
Feelings significantly influence our thoughts and actions. Emotions possess valence and intensity, impacting cognitive processes like attention, memory, and decision-making. The amygdala, a key structure mediating these effects, projects to the prefrontal and sensory cortices, influencing how we direct attention and form memories related to emotional events.
Moreover, emotions can be rational, influencing behavior and thoughts that are strategically successful or insightful. They play a crucial role in personal and social lives, motivating moral behavior and helping achieve goals. Managing emotions involves training oneself to react appropriately, aligning with virtues and contributing to well-being.
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What role do feelings play in mental health and well-being?
Feelings, or emotions, significantly influence mental health and well-being. They affect judgment and can bring either pain or pleasure. Emotional intelligence, which includes understanding, expressing, and managing one's own emotions and recognizing those of others, is vital for healthy relationships and social skills. Positive emotions such as love, respect, and compassion are essential for interpersonal relationships, while so-called negative emotions like anger can be beneficial depending on the context. The ability to appropriately experience and handle a range of emotions is key to a healthy and happy life.
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feeling, in psychology, the perception of events within the body, closely related to emotion. The term feeling is a verbal noun denoting the action of the verb to feel, which derives etymologically from the Middle English verb felen, “to perceive by touch, by palpation.” It soon came to mean, more generally, to perceive through those senses that are not referred to any special organ. As the known special organs of sense were the ones mediating the perception of the external world, the verb to feel came also to mean the perception of events within the body. Psychologists disagree on the use of the term feeling. The preceding definition accords with that of the American psychologist R.S. Woodworth, who defines the problem of feeling and emotion as that of the individual’s “internal state.” Many psychologists, however, still follow the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in equating feeling to states of pleasantness and unpleasantness, known in psychology as affect.
Because of the essentially internal, subjective nature of feeling, its study has been concerned with two distinct problems—namely, how an event is perceived and what the perceived event is.
Study of internal sensitivity
At the turn of the 20th century, German psychologists Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener suggested that the elementary psychological states that make up consciousness, such as sensations, images, and feelings, can be observed and analyzed by experimentation. In 1846 the German physiologist E.H. Weber distinguished only two senses in addition to sight, hearing, taste, and smell, whereas the American neurologist C.J. Herrick in 1931 distinguished 23 classes of receptors involved in such additional senses. Much information has been gained on the perception of relatively simple localized stimulation within the body. It is known, for instance, that moderate increases in temperatures of the skin are perceived as warmth, moderate decreases as cold, checkerboard combinations of moderate increases and decreases as heat, and intense increases as pain. Comparable information has not been gained, however, on the perception of such presumably widespread and heterogeneous internal states as the emotions.
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Perception of emotions
A milestone in the psychology of feeling was the American psychologist William James’s theory of emotion, which held that physiological changes precede emotion. Subsequent evidence indicates that the theory is essentially correct in that there is an internal sensory basis for feeling. More recent work has demonstrated an interaction between physiological arousal and cognition in determining emotional expression.
If emotion is in part a perception initiated by bodily responses, it is obviously desirable to know what these responses are. The best single answer to this question came from the work of the American physiologist W.B. Cannon, who in a long series of experiments was able to show that the major emotions involve excitation of the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system and that such excitation, because of the diffuse conduction, gives rise to a widespread set of specific responses of smooth muscles and glands—increase in heart rate, increase in blood pressure, inhibition of peristaltic movements, increased perspiration, and many others. Compare emotion.