Can you tell the difference between emotions and feelings ? It’s not something very easy to understand and even for many people this difference doesn’t even exist!
However, we have already stated that feelings and emotions are not the same thing, even if they seem to be analogous terms. If you want to understand where they stand out, check out the content below, where we explain everything!
Despite being used as synonyms, the words emotion and feeling have different meanings. To understand, it is important to have the knowledge that an emotion creates a feeling. In turn, this can create new emotions and other feelings.
Basically, emotions and feelings are closely related. This is because, as an emotion generates a feeling, which in turn can initiate emotions, a psychological cycle is constantly developing.
| Definition |
Brain reaction to an environmental stimulus. |
Feelings Result of an emotional experience. |
| types | Primary, secondary and background. | 🇧🇷 |
| Examples |
Understand what human emotions are
As we already advanced above, emotions are immediate reactions to a stimulus .
For example, think of a situation where you are in a dark room, watching a thriller or horror movie. If, outside, there is some unexpected noise, it is natural that you get scared.
This fright is a reaction to some stimuli : the film made his perception a little sharper and the noise came against that.
The same goes for when we watch a dramatic movie. This type of film is already designed so that some scenes stimulate us to the point of crying with emotion.
Another examples
Also think about the moments when you grab your headphones, put on and turn on your favorite music playlist.
Some of them immediately put you in a good mood while others have a slightly sadder tune. In the case of these, it is natural to feel sad and even enjoy the emotion that each song brings.
A different tone of voice can also trigger emotions in us. When we get used to having our bosses or spouses talking to us in a certain way, if the person’s tone of voice changes something in us, it awakens that famous “flea behind the ear”.
With that mistrust can come fear, anxiety, curiosity, and a host of other emotions.
Psychological theorists who studied emotions
Psychologist Lev Vygotsky is one of the theorists with famous works that contribute to understanding the difference between emotion and feeling.
Although his best-known works are in the area of child development, it is very worthwhile to delve deeper into Vygotsky‘s theory of emotions.
In it, the author associates emotions with two types of inheritance: biological and historical-social. For him, you develop your emotional responses both from biological stimuli and those that belong to the environment that surrounds an individual.
types of emotions
Emotions and feelings are very similar. The difference between them is the context of occurrence.
Therefore, knowing that emotions arise as responses to stimuli, check out a list of the main ones below! Furthermore, do the exercise of imagining in which contexts they would appear.
Understand what human feelings are
Speaking now about the feelings part (in order to explain the difference between emotion and feeling), understand that this is a decision built over time .
That is, feeling is also a construction process of the way we evaluate and perceive something or someone.
As we have already commented before, a feeling has a high degree of cognitive involvement, that is, it involves a process of making a decision regarding something consciously or unconsciously in order to indicate preferences and judgments.
Examples
It is for these and other reasons that we find the idea that love is a decision out there. However, it is very confusing when making the distinction between love as a feeling and passion as an emotion.
Yes, love is a feeling that brings together a range of emotions. However, passion is feeling too.
Thus, loving someone or falling in love is a choice we make over time.
Psychological theorists who studied feelings
Among the psychologists who have already addressed feelings in their work, we highlight Burrhus Frederic Skinner , whose performance in the behaviorist aspect of psychology is quite prominent.
For Skinner, in this context of behaviorism , feeling is a sensorial action. That is, it is a human sense as much as vision, hearing and smell.
However, learning how to define and deal with them is a social construct. That is, saying how we feel is a behavior that is learned from our original verbal community.
types of feelings
We close our discussion on the difference between emotion and feeling by describing now some types of feeling:
Most of them you’ve already seen on the list of emotions and we’ve already explained why. The difference is in the context, that is, in the way they arise in us.
Final considerations
We hope this content helps you better understand the difference between emotion and feeling! These are very interesting subjects to study, but few people really know the difference between these two forms of human feeling.
In this regard, it remains to be noted that psychoanalysis and psychology help people to process and deal better with both one and the other. However, each strand will work with emotions and feelings in a different way. For example, psychoanalysis has a very specific working method.
For that reason, it’s important to investigate different types of approaches to understand which one you feel most comfortable with. It is very important for the treatment that you want to talk about your “feeling” and how it may be interfering with your daily life.
How we feel is often beyond our control for a variety of reasons. Therefore, it is necessary to learn what is healthy for us and for our relationships.
