WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMOTIONS AND FEELINGS? - ARTE - 2025

The difference between emotion and feeling, a debate that arises from two terms that are often confused, both in the everyday language of people and in scientific language, since their definitions cause a lot of confusion when distinguishing between one or the other. other.

As early as 1991, the psychologist Richard. S. Lazarus, suggested a theory in which he included the concept of feeling within the framework of emotions.

In this theory, Lazarus considered feeling and emotion as two concepts that are interrelated, for which reason emotion would encompass feeling in its definition. Thus, the feeling for Lazarus is the cognitive or subjective component of emotion, the subjective experience.

In this article I am going to explain to you first what an emotion is and, briefly, the different primary emotions that exist and, later, I will explain the concept of feeling and the differences that exist between the two.

What exactly are emotions and feelings?

Definition of emotion

Basic emotions are those that every human being has ever experienced in life. These are:

• Surprise: Surprise has an adaptive function of exploration. It facilitates attention, focusing it, and promoting exploration and curiosity behaviors towards the novel situation. In addition, cognitive processes and resources are activated towards the surprise situation.
• Disgust: this emotion has the adaptive function of rejection. Thanks to this emotion, responses of escape or avoidance are produced in the face of unpleasant or potentially harmful stimuli for our health. In addition, healthy and hygienic habits are promoted.
• Joy: its adaptive function is affiliation. This emotion increases our capacity for enjoyment, generates positive attitudes both towards oneself and towards others. At the cognitive level, it also favors memory and learning processes.
• Fear: its adaptive function is protection. This emotion helps us to have escape and avoidance responses to dangerous situations for us. It focuses attention primarily on the feared stimulus, making it easy to react quickly. Finally, it also mobilizes a large amount of energy that will allow us to execute responses much faster and more intense than we would in a situation that did not produce fear.
• Anger: its adaptive function is self-defense. Anger increases the mobilization of the energy needed in self-defense responses to something dangerous for us. The destruction of the obstacles that generate frustration and that prevent us from achieving our objectives or goals.
• Sadness: this emotion has the adaptive function of reintegration. With this emotion it is apparently difficult to visualize the benefits of it. However, this emotion helps us to increase cohesion with other people, especially with those who are in the same emotional state as us. In a state of sadness, our usual rhythm of general activity decreases, thus being able to pay more attention to other aspects of life that, in a state of normal activity, we would not have stopped to think about them.

In addition, it helps us to seek help from other people. This encourages the emergence of empathy and altruism, both in the person who is feeling the emotion, and in those who receive the request for help.

Definition of feeling

Feeling is the subjective experience of emotion. As Carlson and Hatfield described in 1992, sentiment is the moment-by-moment assessment that a subject makes each time they are faced with a situation. That is, the feeling would be the sum of the instinctive and brief emotion, together with the thought that we obtain in a rational way from that emotion.

Passing through reasoning, consciousness and its filters, this is how feeling is created. In addition, this thought can feed or maintain the feeling, making it more durable over time.

Thought, just as it has the power to feed each emotion, can exert the power to manage these emotions and avoid feeding an emotion if it is negative.

This is a process that requires training, because managing an emotion, especially to stop it, is not something that is easily learned, it is something that involves a long learning process.

Feelings in childhood

Childhood is a stage that is very important in the development of feelings.

In the relationship with parents, the basis of wanting and knowing how to behave socially is learned. If the emotional ties between parents and children progress positively, in adulthood these children will arrive with a feeling of self-confidence.

Family ties worked from the earliest age will cultivate and generate a personality with the ability to love, respect and coexist harmoniously in their adolescent and adult stages.

When we do not express our feelings or do it in an inappropriate way, our problems increase and even our health can be significantly affected.

The duration of a feeling

The duration of a feeling depends on various factors such as cognitive and physiological. It has its origin at the physiological level in the neocortex (rational brain), located in the frontal lobe of the brain.

Although feelings enhance readiness to act, they are not behaviors as such. That is, one can feel angry or upset and not have aggressive behavior.

Some examples of feelings are love, jealousy, suffering, or pain. As we have already talked about and you can imagine by giving these examples, indeed the feelings are usually of a fairly long duration.

Developing empathy allows people to understand the feelings of other people.

Difference between emotion and feeling

Next, I am going to detail some of the differences between emotion and feelings:

• Emotions are very intense processes but, at the same time, very brief. Just because the emotion is short in duration does not mean that your emotional experience (that is, the feeling) is just as short. The feeling is the result of the emotion, a subjective affective mood usually of long duration consequence of the emotion. The latter will last as long as our consciousness spends time thinking about it.
• The feeling is, then, the rational response that we give to each emotion, the subjective interpretation that we generate in the face of every emotion, having as a fundamental factor our past experiences. That is, the same emotion can trigger different feelings depending on each person and the subjective meaning they give it.
• Emotions, as I have explained previously, are psychophysiological reactions that occur to various stimuli. While feelings are a reaction of conscious evaluation of emotions.
• Another essential difference between emotion and feeling is that emotion can be created unconsciously, whereas in feeling there is always a conscious process involved. This feeling can be regulated through our thoughts. Emotions that are not perceived as feelings remain in the unconscious although, nevertheless, they can have an effect on our behaviors.
• The person who is aware of a feeling has access to his state of mind to, as I have already mentioned, increase it, maintain it or extinguish it. This does not happen with emotions, which are unconscious.
• The feeling is distinguished from the emotion by being constituted by a greater number of intellectual and rational elements. In the feeling there is already some elaboration with the intention of understanding and understanding, a reflection.
• A feeling can be produced by a complex mix of emotions. That is, you can feel anger and love towards one person at the same time.

It is very useful to use our thoughts to try to understand our emotions and feelings, both positive, but especially negative. For this, it is effective to express our feelings to explain to the other person and that he can put himself in our place in the most empathetic and objective way possible.

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

In addition, we must be as specific as possible when specifying the action or event that made us feel that way in order to show the greatest possible objectivity and not make the other person feel like they are being accused directly.

Finally, I am going to give an example of the process by which an instinctive and short-term emotion becomes, through reasoning, a feeling.

This is the case of love. This can begin with an emotion of surprise and joy that someone keeps their attention on us for a while.

When that stimulus is extinguished, it is when our limbic system will report the absence of the stimulus and the consciousness will realize that it is no longer there. It is when you move on to romantic love, a feeling that lasts longer in the long run.

References

1. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harvest Books, October 2000 (ISBN 0-15-601075-5)
2. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Pan Macmillan, April 1994, (ISBN 0-380-72647-5)
3. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, February 2003 (ISBN 0-15-100557-5)
4. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Pantheon, 2010
5. Abe, JA and Izard, CE (1999). The developmental functions of emotions: An analysis in terms of differential Emotions Theory. Cognition and Emotion, 13, 523-549.
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7. Davidson, RJ, Jackson, DC and Kalin. NH (2000) Emotion, plasticity, context, and regulation: Perspectives from affective neuroscience. Psycological Bulletin, 126, 890-909.