Feeling
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Feelings convey information about situations, on both conscious and subconscious levels, via at least 30 neurochemicals acting alone or in concert in complex ways. Examples of feeling include anger, boredom, ecstasy, disgust, fear, happiness, hate, love, lust, pain, pride and shame.
The feeling of fear, for example, is an anticipation of injury, broadly defined. It raises the levels of brain chemicals such as adrenalin and cortisol. In healthy subjects, fear is triggered by stimuli that indicate the presence of risk or direct danger. However, even in the absence of a direct threat, thoughts (the active comparing and contrasting of data), unconscious brain patterns, and imaginings can also promote fearful responses. Fear can therefore be deliberately induced, as occurs regularly in both the political and entertainment realms.
Thoughts and feelings often coexist. A thought can be viewed as a comparing or contrasting of data items while a feeling is a visceral perception of the difference between the items. When a belief is attached to the cause of, or reason for the difference, the perception takes on a specifically labelled quality assigned by experience and called an emotion.
Harvard professor Abraham Maslow suggested that human beings are all born with an innate sense of positive and negative being-values. We are attracted to positive being-values such as justice,honesty, truth,beauty, humour, liveliness, power (but not abusive power), order (but not nit-picking), intelligence. Likewise, we are repulsed by injustice, death, ugliness, weakness, falseness, deceit, chaos, etc.
Maslow asserted that positive being-values are only definable in terms of all other positive being-values—in other words, we cannot maximize any virtue and let it contain some negative being-values without repulsion. For example, beauty that is associated with deceit becomes repulsive. Justice associated with cruelty is repulsive.
This innate capacity to feel attraction or repulsion forms part of the foundation for moral conscience—that is, feelings, perceived, help shape the individual's moral judgements.
Gut feeling
A gut feeling or gut reaction is a visceral emotional reaction to something, often one of disgust. Gut feelings are generally regarded as unmodulated by conscious thought.
"Gut feeling" may also be used as a short-hand term for an individual's "common sense" perception of what is morally right.
Gut feelings, like all reflexive unconscious comparisons can be re-programmed by practice or experiences.
See also
Basic feelings
Anger
Fear
Sadness
Happiness
Disgust
Others
Acceptance
Affection
Aggression
Ambivalence
Apathy
Arousal
Anxiety
Compassion
Confusion
Contempt
Depression
Doubt
Ecstasy
Empathy
Envy
Embarrassment
Euphoria
Forgiveness
Frustration
Guilt
Gratitude
Grief
Hatred
Hope
Horror
Hostility
Homesickness
Hysteria
Loneliness
Love
Paranoia
Pity
Pleasure
Pride
Rage
Regret
Remorse
Shame
Suffering
Surprise
Sympathy
See also
- Affect or Affective
- Feelings
- Emotion
- Intuition
- The Rational Feeling Function in Jung's Psychological Types
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
- Qualia
- Sensation (psychology)
- Touch
- Haptics (disambiguation)
- Vedanā, the Buddhist concept of feeling
