What is the difference between emotions and feelings. What is the difference between emotions and feelings? Reading the face...

In life, concepts such as emotions and feelings, however, these phenomena are different and reflect different meanings. Emotions are not always recognized; sometimes a person cannot clearly formulate what emotions he is experiencing, for example, people say “everything is boiling inside me,” what does this mean? What emotions? Anger? Fear? Despair? Anxiety? Annoyance?. A person cannot always identify a momentary emotion, but a person is almost always aware of a feeling: friendship, love, envy, hostility, happiness, pride.

A person is not always aware of emotions: why he experiences them and what specific emotions, feelings are always conscious, a person realizes why he is friendly or proud, feelings are a personal attitude towards the surrounding reality (objects and objects).

Our emotions are associated with a specific situation, only “here and now” does emotion arise, i.e. emotions are situational and reflect our evaluative attitude towards the situation (present or future, or just possible). Feelings are a stable emotional attitude towards an object (object), i.e. feelings are objective and not related to the situation. But feelings are expressed through emotions, depending on the situation in which a person finds himself. At the same time, emotions and feelings may not coincide or contradict each other, for example, a dearly loved person may in a certain situation cause the emotion of anger.

Emotions are short-term, but feelings are long-lasting and stable, we react to a situation with emotions, for example, the battery of a cell phone is dead at the most inopportune moment, the emotion of anger or frustration arises, these emotions are short-term, when you arrive home, these emotions will no longer be there. And feelings are a long-term attitude towards someone or something; feelings establish a close emotional connection with an object (object) that has motivational significance for a person, i.e. when meeting an object, or when remembering it, the feeling is actualized with new force each time. For example, when we think about a loved one, we may smile, experience some excitement, joy, or feel a “warm feeling” inside.

Feelings and emotions are closely related to each other, but they are not the same thing, emotions are momentary, appear “here and now” and relate to a specific situation, feelings are a stable, constant attitude of a person towards something or someone, feelings do not depend on situations, for example, the feeling of love will not change if the loved one is undeserved, in this situation only emotions will appear: excitement, resentment, sadness, the feeling will remain the same.

Thus, feelings seem to “select” a specific object from a situation, regardless of what is happening around, and emotions “work” on the situation as a whole.

IN what is the difference between emotion and feeling , a debate that arises from two terms that are often confused with each other, both in people's everyday speech and in scientific language, since their definitions cause quite a bit of confusion when distinguishing between one or the other.

Already in 1991, psychologist Richard Lazarus proposed a theory that included the concept of feeling within the framework of emotion.

In this theory, Lazarus considered two interrelated concepts so that emotions cover feeling in their definition. Thus, feeling is a cognitive or subjective component of emotion, subjective experience.

In this article, I will first explain to you what emotion is and, in brief, the various primary emotions that exist, and then I will continue to explain the concept of feeling and the differences that exist between them.

What are feelings and emotions

Definition and classification of emotions

Emotions are effects created multidimensional process which occurs at the level:

• Psychophysiological: changes in physiological activity.
• Behavioral: preparation for action or mobilization of behavior.
• Cognitive: analysis of situations and their subjective interpretation as a function of the personal history of the individual.

Emotional states result from the release of hormones and neurotransmitters, which then transform these emotions into feelings. Responses to stimuli come from both innate brain mechanisms (primary emotions) and behavioral repertoires learned throughout a person's life (secondary emotions).

The most important neurotransmitters involved in the formation of emotions are: dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, cortisol and oxytocin. The brain is responsible for converting hormones and neurotransmitters into feelings.

It is important to be very clear that an emotion is never good or bad as such. All have an evolutionary origin, so it is the body's response to various stimuli for the survival of the individual.

Emotion is also ubiquitous in nonverbal communication. Facial expressions are universal and confirm the emotions you are feeling in that moment.

Functions of emotions

• Adaptive function: prepare a person for action. This function was first demonstrated by Darwin, who related to emotions with the function of facilitating behavior appropriate to each specific situation.
• Social: report our state of mind.
• Motivation: Promote motivated behavior.

Basic characteristics of emotions

The basic characteristics of emotions are those that every person has ever experienced in life. This:

• Surprise: surprise - as an adaptive function of research. This facilitates attention, focus and promotes search behavior and curiosity about a new situation. In addition, cognitive processes and resources are activated towards an unexpected situation.
• Disgust: This emotion has an adaptive function of rejection. This emotion makes avoidance or avoidance responses unpleasant or potentially harmful to our health. In addition, healthy and hygienic habits are improved.
• Joy: Its adaptive function is belonging. This emotion causes us to increase our capacity for pleasure and generates a positive attitude towards ourselves and others. On a cognitive level, it also promotes memory and learning processes.
• Fear: Adaptive protection function. This emotion helps us avoid answering questions. dangerous situations for us. It focuses primarily on the dangerous stimulus, allowing for a quick response. Finally, it will also mobilize a lot of energy that will allow us to carry out much faster and more intense responses about how we would do it in a situation that did not create fear.
• Anger: Its adaptive function is self-defense. Anger increases the mobilization of energy necessary to respond in self-defense to something dangerous to us. Removing obstacles that create frustration and prevent us from achieving our goals or goals.
• Sadness: This emotion has a reintegration of adaptive function. With this emotion, it would seem difficult to imagine the benefits of this. However, this emotion helps us increase our unity with other people, especially those who are in the same emotional state as us. In a state of sadness, our normal rhythm of general activity decreases, allowing us to pay more attention to other aspects of life that in a normal state of activity we would not stop thinking about.

It also helps us seek help from other people. This stimulates the emergence of empathy and altruism, both in the person who feels the emotion and in those who receive the demand for help.

Definition of feeling

A feeling is the subjective experience of emotion. As mentioned by Carlson and Hatfield in 1992, feeling is a moment-by-moment assessment that a subject makes every time he or she encounters a situation. That is, this feeling would be the sum of an instinctive and short-term emotion together with the thought that we receive a rational form of this emotion.

The passage of reasoning, consciousness and its filters thus creates a feeling. In addition, this thought can feed or support the feeling, making it more durable.

Thought, just as it has the power to nourish every feeling, can exert force to control those feelings and avoid the accumulation of emotions in case it is negative.

This is a process that requires learning because managing feelings, especially to stop them, is not something that is easily learned, it is something that entails a long learning process.

Childhood is a stage that has great importance for the development of feelings.

In relationships with parents, a person learns the basics of desire and knowledge of how to behave socially. If the emotional bonds between parents and children are promoted positively, these children will arrive at the adult stage feeling secure in their own right.

Family bonds created from a very early age will cultivate and generate a personality capable of love, respect and coexist harmoniously throughout adolescence and adulthood.

When we do not express our feelings or do so inadequately, our problems increase, they can be affected in important ways even our health.

Duration of feelings

The duration of feelings depends on various factors, such as cognitive and physiological. It has its physiological origin in the neocortex (rational brain), located in the frontal part of the brain.

Although feelings improve willingness to act, they are not behavior per se. That is, a person may feel angry or upset and not have aggressive behavior.

Some examples of feelings are love, jealousy, suffering or pain. As we have already said, and you can imagine these examples, indeed, feelings have a rather long period.

Developing empathy allows people to understand other people's feelings.

In connection with the difference between feelings and emotions, the Portuguese neurologist Antonio Damasio made a definition of how a person moves from emotions to feelings, in which the most characteristic difference between both is reflected quite clearly:

When you experience an emotion, such as the emotion of fear, there is a stimulus that can trigger an automatic response. And this reaction, of course, begins in the brain, but then continues to reflect itself in the body, either in the real body or in our internal simulation of the body. And then we have the ability to project this particular reaction with several ideas that are associated with these reactions and with the object that caused the reaction. When we perceive everything that is, when we have a feeling.

Emotions operate from the very beginning of human life at birth as a warning system. Thus, a baby cries when he is hungry, wants affection, or requires other care.

Already in adulthood, emotions begin to form and improve thinking, drawing our attention to important changes.

Through this thought, when we ask ourselves, how is this person feeling? This allows us to have a real-time approach to a person's sensations and characteristics.

Additionally, it can help us advance feelings toward a future situation by creating an emotional stage of the mind and thus be able to more correctly determine our behavior by anticipating the feelings that arise from those situations.

Main differences

Here are some of the differences between emotions and feelings:

• The emotions are very intense, but at the same time very short. Just because an emotion has a short duration does not mean that your emotional experience (i.e. the feeling) is equally short-lived. A feeling is the result of emotions, a subjective emotional mood, as a rule, a long-term consequence of emotions. The latter will continue as long as our conscious mind takes time to think about it.
• Therefore, a feeling is the rational response we give to every emotion, the subjective interpretation we generate before all emotions have our past experiences as a fundamental factor. That is, the same emotions can cause different feelings depending on each person and subjective meaning.
• Emotions, as I explained above, are psychophysiological reactions that arise in front of various stimuli. While feelings are a conscious reaction of emotions.
• Another significant difference between emotions and feelings is that emotions can be created unconsciously, while in sensation there is always a conscious process. This feeling can be regulated by our thoughts. Emotions that are not perceived as feelings remain in the unconscious, although they can, however, influence our behavior.
• A person who is aware of a feeling has access to his mood, as I already mentioned, to increase it, maintain it or extinguish it. This does not happen with emotions, which are unconscious.
• Feeling differs from emotions in that it consists of more intellectual and rational elements. There is already some kind of elaboration in the feeling with the intention of understanding and understanding, a reflection.
• The feeling may be caused by a complex mixture of emotions. That is, you can feel anger and love for one person at a time.

Understand emotions and feelings

To try to understand our emotions and feelings, both positive and negative, it is very helpful to use our thoughts. To do this, it is effective to express our feelings in order to explain to another person, and who can be put in our place in the most terrifying and objective way.

If you are trying to talk to someone about your feelings, it is advisable to be as specific as possible about how we feel in addition to the extent of that feeling.

Additionally, we should be as specific as possible when identifying the action or event that makes us feel, which is a way to show as much objectivity as possible, rather than making the other person feel like they are being blamed directly.

I will conclude by giving an example of the process by which an instinctive and momentary emotion becomes, through reasoning, a sensation.

This is a case of love. It may start with emotions of surprise and joy that someone is paying attention to us for a while.

When this stimulus fades, that is when our limbic system will report the absence of stimulus, and the conscious mind will understand that this is no longer the case. This is when you move on to romantic love, a feeling that lasts longer in the long run.

It’s difficult for me to understand my feelings - a phrase that each of us has encountered: in books, in movies, in life (someone else’s or our own). But it is very important to be able to understand your feelings.

The Wheel of Emotions by Robert Plutchik

Some people believe - and perhaps they are right - that the meaning of life is in feelings. And in fact, at the end of life, only our feelings, real or in memories, remain with us. And our experiences can also be a measure of what is happening: the richer, more varied, and brighter they are, the more fully we experience life.

What are feelings? The simplest definition: feelings are what we feel. This is our attitude towards certain things (objects). There is also a more scientific definition: feelings (higher emotions) are special mental states, manifested by socially conditioned experiences that express long-term and stable emotional relationships of a person to things.

How are feelings different from emotions?

Sensations are our experiences that we experience through our senses, and we have five of them. Sensations are visual, auditory, tactile, taste and smell (our sense of smell). With sensations everything is simple: stimulus - receptor - sensation.

Our consciousness interferes with emotions and feelings - our thoughts, attitudes, our thinking. Emotions are influenced by our thoughts. And vice versa - emotions influence our thoughts. We’ll definitely talk about these relationships in more detail a little later. But now let’s remember once again one of the criteria for psychological health, namely point 10: we are responsible for our feelings, it depends on us what they will be. It is important.

Fundamental Emotions

All human emotions can be distinguished by the quality of experience. This aspect of human emotional life is most clearly presented in the theory of differential emotions by the American psychologist K. Izard. He identified ten qualitatively different “fundamental” emotions: interest-excitement, joy, surprise, grief-suffering, anger-rage, disgust-disgust, contempt-disdain, fear-horror, shame-shyness, guilt-remorse. K. Izard classifies the first three emotions as positive, the remaining seven as negative. Each of the fundamental emotions underlies a whole spectrum of conditions that vary in degree of expression. For example, within the framework of such a unimodal emotion as joy, one can distinguish joy-satisfaction, joy-delight, joy-jubilation, joy-ecstasy and others. From the combination of fundamental emotions, all other, more complex, complex emotional states arise. For example, anxiety can combine fear, anger, guilt and interest.

1. Interest - positive emotional condition, promoting the development of skills and abilities, the acquisition of knowledge. Interest-excitement is a feeling of capture, curiosity.

2. Joy - positive emotion, associated with the ability to sufficiently fully satisfy an urgent need, the likelihood of which was previously small or uncertain. Joy is accompanied by self-satisfaction and satisfaction with the world around us. Obstacles to self-realization are also obstacles to the emergence of joy.

3. Surprise - an emotional reaction to sudden circumstances that does not have a clearly defined positive or negative sign. Surprise inhibits all previous emotions, directing attention to a new object and can turn into interest.

4. Suffering (grief) is the most common negative emotional state associated with receiving reliable (or seeming) information about the impossibility of satisfying the most important needs, the achievement of which previously seemed more or less likely. Suffering has the character of an asthenic emotion and more often occurs in the form emotional stress. The most severe form of suffering is grief associated with irretrievable loss.

5. Anger is a strong negative emotional state, often occurring in the form of affect; arises in response to an obstacle in achieving passionately desired goals. Anger has the character of a sthenic emotion.

6. Disgust is a negative emotional state caused by objects (objects, people, circumstances), contact with which (physical or communicative) comes into sharp conflict with the aesthetic, moral or ideological principles and attitudes of the subject. Disgust, if combined with anger, can interpersonal relationships motivate aggressive behavior. Disgust, like anger, can be directed toward oneself, lowering self-esteem and causing self-judgment.

7. Contempt is a negative emotional state that arises in interpersonal relationships and is generated by a mismatch in the life positions, views and behavior of the subject with those of the object of feeling. The latter are presented to the subject as base, not corresponding to accepted moral standards and ethical criteria. A person is hostile to someone he despises.

8. Fear is a negative emotional state that appears when the subject receives information about possible damage to his life well-being, about a real or imaginary danger. In contrast to suffering caused by direct blocking of the most important needs, a person, experiencing the emotion of fear, has only a probabilistic forecast of possible trouble and acts on the basis of this forecast (often insufficiently reliable or exaggerated). The emotion of fear can be both sthenic and asthenic in nature and occur either in the form of stressful conditions, or in the form of a stable mood of depression and anxiety, or in the form of affect (horror).

9. Shame is a negative emotional state, expressed in the awareness of the inconsistency of one’s own thoughts, actions and appearance not only with the expectations of others, but also with one’s own ideas about appropriate behavior and appearance.

10. Guilt is a negative emotional state, expressed in the awareness of the unseemlyness of one’s own actions, thoughts or feelings and expressed in regret and repentance.

Table of human feelings and emotions

And I also want to show you a collection of feelings, emotions, states that a person experiences during his life - a generalized table that does not pretend to be scientific, but will help you better understand yourself. The table was taken from the website “Communities of Addicted and Codependent”, author - Mikhail.

All human feelings and emotions can be divided into four types. These are fear, anger, sadness and joy. You can find out what type a particular feeling belongs to from the table.

And for those who read the article to the end. The purpose of this article is to help you understand your feelings and what they are like. Our feelings largely depend on our thoughts. Irrational thinking is often at the root of negative emotions. By correcting these mistakes (working on our thinking), we can be happier and achieve more in life. There is interesting, but persistent and painstaking work to be done on oneself. You are ready?

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P.S. And remember, just by changing your consumption, we are changing the world together! © econet

A person is capable of experiencing many feelings and showing many emotions, but very often we begin to confuse these “concepts”. Most people wonder what the difference is between emotions and feelings, how they manifest themselves, and how one can determine what a person is experiencing, emotions or feelings.

The difference between emotions and feelings

If we turn to psychology, we can give a clear definition of these two similar concepts. - this is a short-term reaction of a person to a specific situation or object; they often manifest themselves spontaneously and almost unconsciously. As for feelings, this is a more conscious and lasting state, which is almost always recognized by a person.

Also, another significant difference between emotions and feelings is their manifestation. Feelings, as a rule, appear inside, and emotions outside, they are difficult to control and hide. For example, a dog unexpectedly scared you, the fear that overcame you at these moments will appear on your face, sharply and unconsciously, and it will be clear to you that it was at that moment that you experienced the emotion of fear. Well, a feeling of fear (for example, fear of snakes, closed spaces, etc.) can “live” in the subconscious for quite a long time or generally all my life. As a rule, feelings do not disappear anywhere, they may simply not appear long time, while emotions appear instantly and can “extinguish” just as quickly.

Very often our emotions develop into feelings, for example, interest, joy at the sight of a particular person can over time develop into pure, sincere and conscious feelings, for example, love.

Another difference between emotions and feelings is that emotions, as a rule, after manifestation, can change a person’s mood, for example, you were unexpectedly frightened and the emotion of fear will lead to a “decline” in your mood, or, conversely, the emotion of joy will instantly “raise” “, feelings usually change sensations.