Feelings: what they are, types and examples

Feelings are an essential part of our experience that we need to understand, as they influence in our decisions and in the perception we have about existence. They allow us to recognize what is happening emotionally inside us. In addition, it is one of the channels that the body has to communicate what we are experiencing in the world, both internal and external.

Imagine that you are on your first date with the person you like. You’ve been preparing for that afternoon for days and you’re finally there walking next to him.. The night is perfect, the conversation is pleasant and you never want it to end. You are happy, your heart wants to jump out of your chest and you feel yourself swimming on a sea of ​​pleasant sensations that you don’t want to abandon.

Also imagine this other situation. You have just received the news that a person you love has died in an accident. You feel an emptiness in your chest and perceive the world as unreal. “This can’t be happening,” you say. Suddenly sadness has established a home in your life and you find yourself submerged not in a pleasant sea, but in a dark ocean of pain.

I hope you can experience more situations like the first one and less like this last one.. But the reality is that in our lives both ways of feeling are part of the repertoire of our passage through this world. It is an essential characteristic of being human to be able to feel what happens to us. Now what exactly is this feel?

If you go back to the two previous experiences, you will realize that they are very different, even somewhat opposite. However, despite their discrepancies, they have something in common: both manifest themselves in our body, they have a biological reflection. This is obvious, I know, but it is the key to everything.

What are feelings?

Damasio (2011) defines feelings as the ‘perception of a certain state of the body together with the perception of a certain way of thinking and thoughts with certain topics’ (p. 100).

The awareness that our body is in a certain way is the key to all feelings. The essential content of all feeling is the particular representation of the body. Its substrate is the set of neural patterns that map the body state from which a mental image of the state of the body can emerge (Damasio, 2011).

Feelings are closely related to perception., with an idea, with a representation, with the ability to be aware of what happens to us in the body. In this sense, feelings are not necessarily products of an emotion. They are a broader process that arises from any set of homeostatic reactions. It covers everything that refers to the body.

Feelings and emotions

People tend to equate feelings with emotions, but they are not exactly the same. What is the difference?

Emotions are a multidimensional response of short duration which involves a series of triggering conditions, evaluative processes, physiological changes, subjective experiences, whose purpose is adaptation to an environment in continuous change (Fernández-Abascal, et al., 2010).

For its part, Feelings are the awareness or bodily perception of the emotion. Although, as we have seen, it is a broader process that encompasses everything that refers to the body. However, at an affective level it is the perception of bodily changes induced by emotions.

Furthermore, emotions are short-lived, and are often intense and automatic, while feelings last longer, are usually less intense, and we usually have greater conscious control over them.

An example of the above is resentment. One of the emotions that underlies this feeling is anger. When this emotion extends over time, reduces its intensity and is mediated by a much more reflective process, it becomes a feeling of resentment.

Functions of feelings

Feelings and emotions are fundamental in social relationships and in the decision making that social life requires.. They are important for reasoning.

Positive or negative emotions and their respective feelings are directly involved in our social experiences (Otero, 2006). In addition to the above, why do we need feelings? Is it not enough to respond adaptively at an automatic level (emotion)? Why add consciousness to this process (feeling)?

Damasio (1996) states that By being aware of our emotions, we achieve a higher level of protection. Knowing our emotion allows us to think beyond and predict the probability that what excites us (object of emotion) is present in a given context, so that it can be avoided or anticipated, instead of having to react urgently to its occurrence. appearance.

This same author states that another advantage of feeling our emotions is that we can generalize our knowledge and decide to act accordingly. Being aware of emotions helps us make our responses more flexible. based on the history of interactions with the environment.

Types of feelings

Basically, There are two types of feelings: emotional feelings and deep feelings. (Damasio, 1996). Feelings of emotions are all those that are associated with the awareness of a particular emotional state. Its manifestation depends on the emotional reaction.

Among these types of feelings we can find some that are positive and others negative. Positive means those feelings in which pleasant sensations predominate., pleasant and well-being. For example:

Love: It is the affection that inclines us towards a person, animal or object for whom we wish good.Hope: It is the confidence of achieving what we expected or desired.Satisfaction: It is the emotion that emerges when we have fulfilled a wish.Joy: It is the intense emotion caused by an event that pleases us very much. It is closely associated with pleasure.Enthusiasm: It is the exaltation of our state of mind as a result of an event.

By negative we understand those feelings in which Unpleasant or unpleasant sensations predominate. For example:

Sadness: emotion that occurs in the face of an unfavorable event or the loss of something or someone significant.Gonna: emotional reaction we have when a negative result occurs for our interests.Anxiety: It is the restlessness, nervousness or excitement that we feel when faced with a situation that we conceive as dangerous.Shame: emotion associated with the perception of loss of dignity as a consequence of a mistake or the confession of a point of vulnerability.Disappointment: emotion that occurs when reality does not meet our expectations.

On the other hand, Background feelings are those that do not originate from emotional states. For example, appetite, proprioception (ability to sense the relative position of body parts), interoception (sensations that come from the internal organs of the body). It is the image we have of our body state when it is not being greatly influenced by emotions.

After the previous presentation, some of the conclusions we can reach are the following:

All emotions generate feelingsas long as we are aware and perceive our emotional reactions. Although feelings can be related to emotions, They are not reduced to these and can also occur in their absence.Feelings are a process of perception of the states of the body in the absence or presence of emotions, and can be more general and lasting than the latter.You might be interested…