What are feelings and emotions? A new guide for self-discovery.
A helpful companion for feelings and emotions, including scientific theories, descriptive language, and practical suggestions.
If the human race is to develop a more wholesome and balanced way of life, we need to cultivate a new inner ecology, where the mental faculty is deeply connected with the felt experience and living wisdom of the body.” — John Welwood
I think, therefore I am…stuck in my head?
How do you know who your friends are, what you want for dinner, what work brings you satisfaction, whether or not to seek medical care, or any other day-to-day decision? Is it by thinking, by feeling, or some combination? I won’t be the first to point out that Western culture, especially since the Enlightenment, has been convinced that reason, scientific and critical thinking, and secular values are the bedrock of making good decisions. The basic idea is that we can use our intellect and rational, logical thought, unencumbered by feelings and emotions to arrive at the objective truth. Not just the truth, but an ideal society.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that science and rationality have generally been preferenced in our culture over the more fluid, feminine aspects ourselves: emotions, feelings, intuitions, relationships. Spirituality, too, has been crowded out of public life except in the form of top-down organized religion or in cases where a scientific study “proves” the value of spiritual practice, as with the science of meditation. While I consider myself an enthusiast in several areas of scientific research, I think we’ve overweighted rational thinking as a culture at the expense of other ways of knowing. (Scientists seem to agree: Research from Antonio Damasio has pointed out that feelings and emotions are actually an essential part of reasoning.)
What have we lost, as a result? The richness of our individual experiences of ourselves and each other in relationship. A separateness that by a conservative estimate has muted the experience of life and led to myriad expressions of despair — anxiety, depression, and really anything else in the DSM — and if you’re willing to go there, I would argue (in the spirit of Charles Eisenstein’s work) is part of the reason we’re edging closer to destroying all of the beautiful life on this planet, ourselves included. You don’t need to be on board with all of this to keep reading, though. I promise: We’re just going to talk about our feelings now.
The practicality of feelings and emotions (with a pause for trauma)
Several years ago, in the midst of ongoing chronic pain after being hit by a car and not acknowledging three decades of untended obsessive-compulsive disorder, I began my own journey with therapy (spirituality followed shortly thereafter). My ask was to get unstuck and to start feeling something, anything! So much of my own situation and most of the diagnoses handed out by mental health professionals are related to checking out of our experience — by seemingly benign things like exercise or more harmful addictions. We want more. We have the instinct that more is on offer. A friend and mentor began showing me that getting descriptive with my experience was the way to do this.
This is a story that’s rippling through culture already, as Bessel van der Kolk’s excellent book about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, sits at the top of the NYT Bestseller list for non-fiction. And while we’re on the topic of trauma, a brief digression: Not feeling is an intelligent response to circumstances. Not feeling some aspects of our experience might be the best response for a person or even whole groups of people living with the threat of violence, as in the case of abusive relationships or systemic oppression. Not feeling is how neglected children survive. This primer on feeling and emotion makes the case that we’ll all be better off feeling more, yes, but there needs to be a foundation of safety first (or, at the same time). Nobody should tell a person with unresolved trauma to just feel more; there’s a process for that, and it involves therapy and a lot of love.
Feelings, sensations, emotions, the felt sense, and more
The words “feeling” and “emotion” are often used interchangeably. We might in everyday conversation use the word “feel” to describe feelings, emotions, and other states of being. I feel sick, tired, angry, great, and so on. It’s helpful to get a finer definition of these words — not to be correct, but so we can understand this body of ours better. With really attentive parenting, we’d get this as children. We’d be mirrored in all of our experiences and build a strong sense of self and identity. But the reality is that most of us didn’t get this — and neither did our parents and their parents.
So what are feelings? Feelings are sensations
The author and psychotherapist John Welwood has described feelings as “a depth of experiencing that serves as an entry-point into the lifestream of the unfolding present. It’s flowing, not coagulated. It’s an intelligent attunement to what is happening, not a reaction against anything.”
I’m adding my own interpretation here, but I think a slightly less poetic way of saying the same thing is to describe feeling as sensing. As sensations about what’s happening in our body inside and in relationship to the world around us.
The word feel has its origins in Old English felan, “to touch or have a sensory experience of; perceive, sense (something),” and in late Old English “have a mental perception.” The evolution of the word seems to include physical sensations, emotions, as well as knowings or intuitions. Clearly, it can mean a lot of different things, but let’s start with the senses.
So, what are these sensory experiences? We know the basics: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. We can add to that other types of sensory experiences, including balance (the vestibular sense), body position and movement (proprioception and kinesthesia), pain (nociception), temperature (thermoception), and the perception of sensations inside the body, including internal organ function and what’s happening with our autonomic nervous system (interception).
It’s probably fair to say that in our contemporary lives we don’t notice the power of our senses because we’re habitually overstimulated, but we are powerful sensing creatures. Scientists estimate that the human eye can detect a candle flame at 2.76 kilometers (and it can detect light photos from much further away).
Psychology would add that separate from sensations, we have perceptions, which are organized sensations, or our conscious and unconscious attempts to comprehend sensations. While our sensations are more fundamental, our perceptions can be affected by our beliefs, values, prejudices, culture, and life experiences, as well as how we use our attention. As we start to work with our sensations, we’re in the territory of perception.
Thinking about our feelings as sensations is the gateway to our emotions and to the more abstract expressions of feeling. In other words, knowing if we’re hungry, if we have to pee, if we have pain in the left shoulder, if we’re spinning in circles rolling down a hill or moving in a subway car — this is also how we know if we’re heartbroken. This is how we know ourselves. This is somewhat obvious, but it’s important.
Why? Because we’re increasingly outsourcing a lot of our self-knowledge to algorithms and iPhone apps. Part of the success of science includes waiting on a data set to tell us many things we can know from direct experience (like how we slept). We have incredible biology for sensing and perceiving, so much so that we can feel the oneness of everything with them, but I promised we’d stick to talking about our feelings. With that in mind, here’s a great list of “feeling” words from the psychotherapist and author of, It’s Not Always Depression, Hilary Jacobs Hendel.
What are emotions? A combination of sensations and more
There are many different theories of emotions and it’d be easy to get lost in them (see? lots of scientists do). We’re going to poke around and maybe get a little lost in those theories, too, let’s start out by saying that the first western psychological theory of emotions from William James is still considered pretty accurate.
James said that emotions are our experience of the bodily sensations that follow some sort of event or stimulus.
It’s worth reading James on this point. Here he is in, What is an emotion?
Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.
Affective neuroscientists, who study the neural basis of emotions and mood, tend to think that a modified version of this theory is basically correct — adding in that other forms of information also contribute to emotion, such as the social context and our cognition. This makes sense intuitively, that our past experiences, including emotional experiences, would form a sort of library that influences how our emotional experiences in the future. This all tracks how many types of somatic or body-based psychotherapies (Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy, Hakomi, Sensorimotor Therapy, and Somatic Experiencing) work, by focusing on a combination of body sensations and the emotions and stories that emerge from them.
I want to point out before we jump into some of the theories of emotion that science is only one way that we have to describe our emotions. It happens to be the way we study them (and everything else), but I actually want to acknowledge that it’s a limitation as much as an asset, including in this very article, where I think I lean too heavily on science. A mother does not need science to explain emotions as she sits with her newborn. Science, as our main way of truth-finding, may yet help us remember our emotions, though, if we can weight it appropriately. We can use our heads to return to our hearts. In future updates and articles, I hope and aim to explore the other ways we know our emotions — through stories, songs, and art. That said, here are some of the theories of emotion.
- Charles Darwin: Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, a year after The Descent of Man. Paul Ekman considers this book the first pioneering study of emotion and “the book that began the science of psychology.” In it, he describes emotions as distinct entities (rage, anger, indignation, etc.), expressed in the face, which are universal (with culture-specific conventions), shared by other animals, and signal some kind of information about our intentions.
- James-Lange: This is the theory I mentioned above. Developed by the philosopher John Dewey and named after William James and Carl Lange, this view of emotions basically says they are a product of physiological arousal. First, something happens in the body. Then, based on whatever pattern that is in the body, an emotion bubbles up. As James said, “our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.” This theory has held up well over time and is favored by affective neuroscientists.
- Cannon-Bard: Walter Cannon and Philip Bard disagreed with the James-Lange theory. They claimed that the physiological response to a stimulus and the subjective feeling of emotion are separate events that happen simultaneously. Their theory is also known as the thalamic theory of emotion because it holds that a stimulus reaches the brain and in particular processes in the thalamus, which are discharged in the form of emotional expression and bodily changes.
- James Papez: Papez also argued for the importance of the thalamus, but in his theory there were two streams out of it — thinking and feeling. Either stream could generate emotions.
Paul Maclean: Maclean described the triune architecture of the brain, which many people will be familiar with: the reptilian brain (the striatal complex and basal ganglia), the home of primitive emotions like fear and aggression; the old mammalian brain or visceral brain (thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, cingulate cortex, amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex), which modifies the primitive emotions and includes social emotions; and the new mammalian brain (neocortex), which connects emotion and cognition. In this view, emotional experiences include sensations from the world and information from the body. He also coined the term, “limbic system” for the visceral brain.
- Schachter-Singer: Researchers Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer came up with the two-factor theory of emotion, which holds that physiological events happen and are then cognitively interpreted in the form of emotions. This means that social and cognitive contexts help inform emotions.
- Zajonc-LeDoux: Robert Zajonc and Joseph LeDoux theorized some emotions don’t need any cognitive process. You can go right from stimulus to emotion with no intervening thoughts.
- Appraisal theory: Appraisal theories originate with Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus. These theories argue that thinking happens as an intermediary between stimulus and both the physiological response and the emotion. In other words, emotions come after interpretations of circumstances.
- Somatic marker hypothesis: The somatic (or interoceptive) marker hypothesis comes from Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist well known for his book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. This theory says that physiological changes (somatic markers) reference previous events with similar emotional experiences. This is especially important for making decisions in situations where logic isn’t sufficient.
So here are some of the theories, and you can see that many of them do sound similar to what James wrote about. The field of neuroscience is filled with much more detailed explanations of how this all works in the brain and body, but I’ll let you follow some of the embedded links if you want more. (This is a good place to start.) The one reason it’s kind of nice to understand the process of emotions relates to something I mentioned only briefly before: attention. The more we bring our attention to the emotional experience — with mindfulness, for example — the more we really get to see how we work. Over time, this becomes are a really important opportunity to grow and change, leaving behind patterns that don’t serve us.
As a way to look at the emotional experience one more time through a science-y lens, here’s a breakdown of what’s happening from the psychologist Paul Ekman. His site, the Atlas of Emotions, is a useful interactive tool for understanding emotions. I’m going to paraphrase a bit, but here the components of an emotional experience as he describes them.
- Precondition: This is whatever state or context you’re in before you have the emotion. Being hungry, for example, could inform your emotional experience.
- Event: This is the situation, thought, memory, smell, etc., that we encounter either in the world or within ourselves.
- Trigger: The event meets our body.
- Perception database: This language really takes the fun out of it, but this describes our hard-wired responses (think: fear response in a dangerous situation) as well as the rich complexity of all our previous life experiences that contribute to emotional experiences (the smell of your favorite childhood food).
- Physical changes: The changes in our body that constitute the emotional experience as James described it.
- State: This is the experience itself, which includes the physical changes and whatever our psychological experience of them is.
- Psychological changes: This describes what it’s like to be you in the experience. What does sadness or anger feel like to you? The more you pay attention to it, the more you’ll know. This is our second definition of feeling. The first was sensations, and now we have a more robust sense of the word feeling.
- Action: Our response to the emotion. We might yell in response to anger, or we might suppress it.
- Post-condition: The result of our emotional actions, which could be internal or external.
What are the core or primary emotions?
So that’s the process of emotions, but what about emotions themselves? There are several core emotions that are thought to be hard-wired or shared among all people. We can call these core emotions or primary emotions. These are the non-negotiables. Although they have been described by psychologists and psychotherapists, they certainly weren’t the first. The Book of Rites is a Chinese text dating back to the Zhou Dynasty (likely before the year 907), and it describes pleasure, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hate, and desire.
The psychologist Paul Ekman, who we mentioned above, considers the primary emotions to be anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The author and psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel considers the core emotions sadness, fear, anger, joy, excitement, sexual excitement, and disgust.
Primary emotions
- Anger
- Disgust
- Excitement
- Fear
- Happiness/Joy
- Sadness
- Sexual Excitement
- Surprise
And beyond these primary emotions, or as gradations and combinations of them, we all experience a vast array of emotions with more subtlety and nuance. These are sometimes referred to as secondary emotions, and they might be hard-wired or they might be influenced by our own particular experience and cultural milieu. If you’re looking to build your emotional vocabulary, there are feeling wheels and all kinds of lists that can help us build more appreciation for our own emotional experiences. It’s helpful to have a list like this on hand and to start exploring the physical sensations and words that go with an experience you’re having. I’ll point you again to a resource from Hendel’s website, which I think is comprehensive.
What about love, depression, and anxiety — or not feeling much at all?
You might be thinking, “I don’t really feel many emotions. I haven’t cried in years.” Or, “What about love — how is love not an emotion?” I’m going to leave love alone for now because depending on who you ask it could be a strong attachment to another person, a combination of emotions, or a fundamental property of the universe.
As for not feeling, or having the sense of blunted emotions, that’s pretty common in our culture, which doesn’t support emotional expression — does it feel okay to be sad or angry at your workplace? — and it’s actually something of an epidemic. We learn to express our emotions as children when we’re mirrored and allowed to feel whatever arises automatically. While more conscious parenting is becoming more common, the status quo is still controlling children’s emotions so their behavior is manageable. Even if they’re not intentionally squashing their children’s life force, parents who aren’t emotionally developed will fail to mirror their children or react in a way (with discomfort, for example) that lets them know it’s not okay to express. Instead, we adapt by finding ways to avoid feeling: joking and sarcasm, exercising too much, staying really busy at work, and so on. And it’s by not feeling, by not fully inhabiting our experience, that we find ourselves with depression and anxiety. Welwood describes this nicely:
Underlying our emotions there is a deeper complex of genuine feeling. Depression, for example, is usually a frozen expression of more fluid feelings that lie underneath — perhaps sorrow, pain, anger, or vulnerability. When we connect directly to these deeper feelings, they become a doorway that helps us connect with what is going on inside us. Frozen emotion, by contrast, keeps us locked up and out of the feeling body. It is a defense against going down and into the vulnerability of the feeling body, which is tender and very sensitive.
Feeling more is living more
If you’ve read this far you probably don’t need a closing pitch on the gifts of feelings and emotions, but I will share one more piece of scientific research that does help tie these concepts together. This relates to the concept of interoception: the perception of sensations inside the body. Studies show that stress and trauma can blunt our ability to notice and interpret feelings and emotions, or in some cases raise the volume on them in such a way that they’re intolerable. Coming back into contact with the language of our body can help us come back into relationship with ourselves — experiencing emotional regulation, more ease, opportunities to rewrite old patterns, more availability to relationships, and a greater sense of freedom.
