Throughout our lives, people experience infinite feelings, which tend to manifest themselves in the polarities of positive feelings or negative feelings. Feelings make us human, they make us people and therefore understanding their meaning and the types of feelings we can experience will help us understand ourselves better and establish closer and healthier relationships. Therefore, in this Psychology-Online article we will explain What are feelings: types, list and examples of them.
Feeling and emotion
What are feelings and emotions? It is common to place emotions and feelings on the same plane and it is not surprising, since there is a close relationship between the concept of feeling and emotion, despite the fact that the two processes depend on each other, They are different states. Therefore, before being able to understand feelings and their types, it is especially important to know what differentiates them from emotions.
What are emotions?
The definition of is a reaction of our body, psychophysiological, cognitive and behavioral, which leads us to react in a certain way to an external agent, such as being happy to receive good news or internal, such as being sad when remembering a bitter memory. The emotions appear instantly facing the event and have a short durationtending to be situated in polarities of positive emotion or negative emotion.
What are feelings? Definition
Feelings are a mood that occurs in relation to external inputs, considered the mental expression of the emotion. Where do feelings come from? When the emotion is processed in the brain and the person is aware of said emotion and the mood it produces, it gives rise to the feeling, therefore the origin of the feelings are the emotions defined and rationally valued that will determine our mood. .
Feeling and emotion: difference
Although both emotions and feelings are the result of an irrational process due to the subjective way of perceiving a given situation, emotions maintain a pattern basic and primitive unidirectional, that is, the emotion appears immediately and spontaneously after the presentation of the stimulus. On the contrary, feelings intervene reflective processes, about which the person becomes aware of their state of mind and what they are feeling, allowing them to be valued. Once we understand the , we are going to focus exclusively on the feelings.
Types of feelings
People can experience many feelings that lead us to different moods, however their division has focused on the polarity of these, establishing a classification around the positive and/or negative feelings depending on the response they provoke in the person.
Types of positive feelings
Positive feelings are pleasant feelings that produce a perception of well-being in the person and involve feelings of pleasure. Positive feelings contribute greatly to preserving our physical and mental health, because they help reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. On the other hand, they help alleviate the appearance of negative feelings.
Types of negative feelings
Unlike positive feelings, negative feelings produce feelings of discomfort in the person and are unpleasant. It is advisable not to confuse negative feelings with bad feelings. Negative feelings are also useful and functional. Sometimes we try to get rid of them, although are necessary for our development and progress as people.
However, it is important to make a correct managing negative feelingsbecause contrary to the positive ones, they can be the precipitants of high levels of stress and anguish and with this, generate physical or mental health problems, such as the development of a .
List of feelings
Let’s now get to know the main feelings grouped into the two classifications: positive and negative feelings.
List of positive feelings
There are many positive feelings that we can experience throughout our lives, which can broadly be grouped into the following feelings:
- Happiness: is a primary emotion that is understood as a feeling of absolute satisfaction, which is born from another emotion and makes us value the environment around us in a positive way.
- Love: love is a feeling towards someone or something and the desire is born that that person or thing has everything good it can have, it brings out the best in ourselves.
- Euphoria: Euphoria is the maximum expression of joy, which leads to an increase in our energy and makes us look at life in a much more positive way.
- Hope: having faith in achieving what one longs for.
- Motivation: reaction of enthusiasm and energy to a duty or action.
- Passion: feeling that is closely related to love and tends to appear in the sexual sphere.
- Satisfaction: feeling that occurs after completing something well done, which stimulates confidence and security in ourselves.
- Fun: focusing our attention on an action that makes us spend our time pleasantly and gives us well-being.
- Well-being: state of balance between the somatic and psychic levels of the person.
- Enthusiasm: feeling that arises from motivation towards an event.
List of negative feelings
In the same way as with positive feelings, there are many negative feelings that we can experience, however we must not forget that learn to live with negative feelings and giving them the importance and dedication they deserve will help us grow as people. The different negative feelings that we can find broadly are the following:
- Anger: feeling of disgust towards someone or something, which causes a bad disposition towards the object that generates anger.
- Anger: it is a primary emotion that is due to a high intensity of anger.
- Fear: anguish caused by the perception of a danger that may be real or imagined.
- Worry: state of concern that appears in the face of a problem or circumstance.
- Sadness: a feeling that comes with emotional pain and causes great discomfort, which can trigger thoughts of a pessimistic nature and a tendency to cry.
- Guilt: responsibility that the person assumes for a fact or action, which carries a negative connotation.
- Stress: state of mind of overwhelm due to the perception of feeling overwhelmed by a certain circumstance.
- Frustration: feeling that arises from the impossibility of completing what was needed or desired.
- Indignation: feeling of anger for considering a fact or action as unfair.
- Shame: discomfort in the face of a fact about which the person has felt humiliated or due to fear of being made a fool of.
- Vulnerability: a feeling that encompasses feelings of fragility, helplessness, sensitivity, etc., which trigger a global feeling of perceived vulnerability.
Feelings: examples
Let’s now look at some examples of very frequent feelings that can appear in our daily lives:
- We receive an email where our boss tells us that we must go to work on Saturday. First, we may experience an emotion of anger, but after becoming aware of what we are feeling, sadness feelings for not being able to do what you had planned with your partner or anger for having to go to work on a weekend.
- We find out that two of our friends have been invited to a party to which we have not been invited. First, emotional responses of indignation may appear, but after understanding the situation, feelings of vulnerabilitywhere we feel insecure and wonder why we haven’t been invited.
- They notify us that they are going to promote us at work. For example, it could be that our expressed emotion is not what is expected, reacting with a rather apathetic tone. By processing the news and understanding how we feel, we can be aware of the feeling it gives us, which can be a feeling of stress and fearfacing the challenge that is posed to us.
These are some of the many examples of feelings on which we can find ourselves, where we can observe that emotions and feelings are two different processes, on which the initial reaction, the emotion, may not have the same emotional tone as the feeling, once the information has been processed and we have become aware of how this information or fact makes us feel, which is where the feeling is born.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Bibliography
- Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The power of good feelings. Mind and Brain, 8, 74-78.
- Marina, JA, & Penas, ML (1999). Dictionary of feelings. Barcelona: Anagram.
- Tables, AA (2004). Regulation of conflicts and feelings. Peace and conflict manual, 201-222.
- Pallarés, M. (2010). Emotions and feelings. Marge Books.