Understanding Human Emotions and Feelings: A Psychological Perspective
Emotions and Feelings
Emotions and feelings are important in assessing and judging one’s emotional life. They are affective states produced by humans, belonging to the experiential-affective domain in their appearance and expression.
Emotions
Emotions begin to emerge from the 3rd quarter IUD. Excitement arises suddenly and abruptly. It is instinctive and innate, not learned. However, it is acquired through complex learning processes within a culture and the incorporation of personal experiences.
Emotion is a psychological adaptation process, recruiting and coordinating other psychological processes for rapid and effective responses to environmental changes.
Emotions include observable behaviors, expressed feelings, and changes in personal status. They also affect perception, memory, verbal and nonverbal communication, and physiological states. Their aim is to coordinate all psychological resources for quick responses to triggering situations.
In psychology, emotion explains organism reactions and is characterized by:
- Changes in physiological activity.
- Subjective interpretation of these changes.
- Preparation for action.
- Emotional expression and externalization.
Emotion has two basic elements: cognitive appraisal of a situation and the resulting bodily activation.
Feelings
Feelings integrate conscious psychophysical elements, mental representations, and emotional components emerging from an individual’s biographical elements. They are archetypal, universal, yet individually lived.
Feelings, shaped by our social and cultural context, result from relationship experiences. They are more complex, stable, durable, and less intense than emotions. They arise not from momentary stimuli but from progressive states leaving lasting marks.
A feeling is a mood triggered by significant events, whether joyful or painful. It results from an emotion, making the subject aware of their mood.
Feelings are linked to brain dynamics, determining reactions to events. They are impulses of sensibility towards what is perceived as positive or negative.
In other words, feelings are conceptualized emotions determining mood. Healthy feelings lead to happiness and balanced brain dynamics; unhealthy ones can cause disorders like depression.
Changes in emotional loads determine feeling characteristics. Emotions are shorter-lived but generate longer-lasting feelings.
Feelings can be positive, promoting good deeds, or harmful, promoting wrongdoing. It is crucial to control and change harmful feelings. For example, a person feeling hatred and planning murder must control those feelings to prevent crime. One should not be guided solely by feelings, as they are instinctive and can lead to irrational acts or loss of freedom.
Understanding the Psychological Processes Underlying Emotions and Feelings
Emotions and feelings are phenomena representing varied ways of adapting to stimuli. They are sudden reactions with short durations, establishing a psychotherapeutic effect.
Psychologically, emotions are feelings or perceptions of reality or imagination, related to the primary psychological process of perception, preceded by sensation. Emotion is expressed physically through physiological functions like facial reactions or heart rate, and behaviorally through aggression or crying. This is the emotional response.
Prior to this, cognitive processes assess stimulus information, a subjective component greatly influencing the emotional response, which is determined by the environment and physiological changes.
Emotional responses are quickly executed by biological systems, manifesting as facial expressions, muscular expressions, cardiac changes, voice alterations, central nervous system activity, and endocrine system changes. This establishes our position in relation to our environment, leading us towards or away from certain people, objects, actions, or ideas.
Feelings result from emotions, providing awareness of one’s mood. This can be expressed physically and spiritually, part of the brain’s reactive capacity.
Feelings can be positive or negative, forming the basis of evocative memory, related to the psychological process of memory. This involves coding, recoding, clustering, and searching information, such as recall and recognition. Feelings can be short- or long-term, managed by evocative memory indefinitely.
This process is complex and comprehensive, containing vast information and structure, and relating significantly to other cognitive processes. Understanding emotional response is key to defining feeling.
Theories of Emotions
James-Lange Theory of Emotion
This theory, formulated in the early twentieth century by James and Lange independently, posits that emotions begin with a perception of the body. For example, anticipating a martial arts competition against a superior opponent triggers physiological changes (increased heart rate, muscle tension), leading to the assumption of fear. Emotions result from perceiving bodily changes caused by external stimuli. Initially rejected due to lack of empirical evidence, some aspects are now supported by experimental data.
Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion
Witnessing a bank robbery, seeing the thief escape with a lady’s portfolio, triggers both a physiological reaction and the feeling of rage simultaneously. Cannon-Bard proposed that after an external stimulus, information splits into two routes: one to the cerebral cortex, producing conscious emotion (rage), and another activating the body through primitive brain structures and the peripheral nervous system. This theory shifted the focus back to the nervous system (brain).
Theories of Emotions as Jean-Paul Sartre
Psychoanalytic Theory
Emotions are understood by their functional meaning and goals. They can be a form of rejection, censure, or escape, similar to sleep as an escape from decision-making. However, emotion is not always an escape. Psychoanalysis presents a causal link and a bond of understanding between phenomena, though these are sometimes incompatible.
Phenomenological Theory
Behavior is thoughtless; there is an unconscious. Consciousness is self-aware, transcending and including the world. It transforms itself by transforming the world, projecting emotional meanings and living in the created world. – Jean-Paul Sartre
Theories of Feelings
Theory of Feelings by Carlos Castilla del Pino
Castilla del Pino’s theory establishes a new genealogy of feelings, based on ten fundamental laws. A person without feelings is nothing, lacking conflicts and desires. Feelings extend beyond individuals to stimuli like material things, animals, and thoughts. Feelings change individuals temporarily or permanently. Feeling is a two-part process: the cognitive-emotional experience caused by an object and the resulting bodily effects. Stimuli vary according to perception, triggering different feelings.
Feelings are transferable; remembering a feeling is not the same as experiencing it. Everyone has feelings; they can be suppressed but not eliminated, as they give meaning to actions.
Drives and desires, particularly the desire for possession (protosentimiento), are at the root of emotional dynamics, starting in newborns. The world is initially reduced to objects to possess. Experience transforms protosentimiento into a pre-sentiment, leading to acceptance or rejection. Experience branches out into feelings, and affective evaluations of these feelings create metasentimientos (guilt, shame). Thus, protosentimientos, hunches, feelings, and metasentimientos are stages of emotional development.
Theory of Self-Worth
According to Lersch, self-worth, along with the feeling of power, is a stable mood indicating personal value. Its opposite is the feeling of inferiority. Insecurity in self-worth is addressed through social comparison. Rogers refers to unconditional positive self-value, where no experience is valued more or less for self-esteem.