Can there be sensations. What are human feelings: classification and how to understand them
Feelings and sensations are often similar, they are often confused.
Feelings are often referred to as “sensation”: “feeling of closeness” is about the same as “feeling of closeness”, “feeling of loss of contact” - the same as “I feel that contact has disappeared” ...
In fact, sensations and feelings (inner feelings) are easy to distinguish: sensations are elementary kinesthetics, and feelings are sensations already processed by the mind, this is a holistic and meaningful vision of what is happening.
"Warm hugs" is not about 36 degrees Celsius, it's about the history of our relationship, as well as the feeling "I'm uncomfortable with him" - speaks of much more than the feeling of "shaking my shoes."
Feeling can be perceived as just physiology, there is always an element of reason in feelings.
As DE writes: "What goes through the body is not yet an emotion, if it is not appropriated by the person himself. Here is a vivid example from the gestalt session. I am very empathic - I feel other people's emotions at the level of the body. So when the group vividly experienced the individual session, some even cried, I also felt a spasm in my throat, but I did not have any such experiences, and as an emotion I did not qualify it for myself, only as a bodily sensation. then the group gave feedback and said that they lived through these emotions, felt them, plunged into them. And not everyone succeeded in getting out of these emotions right away. Some even didn’t let go in the evening. the body suffocates from resentment, is it so? But I was clearly aware of everything, I didn’t feel any offense. Well, my throat squeezed - it happens that the general atmosphere was like that, so the body became aggravated. As soon as the situation changed, breathing became free, and there were no residual laziness was not observed in the evening. So I think bodily phenomena, without the participation of the mind, are not emotions. "
Feelings already live at the level of perceptions, which is why the feeling "pleasant - not pleasant" is not yet quite a feeling. To distinguish these emotionally charged sensations from real feelings, they are called the "emotional tone of the sensations." Feelings are sensations from the emotionally charged.
They confuse feelings and sensations because both feelings and sensations always come not from, but from. More precisely, on their way they can pass through the head, but ultimately they come to us from the body, as something living in the body. And everything that comes to our soul from the body is perceived as a sensation. A person can speak as about feeling and sensation about anything, if during speaking he feels the source in his body, if the ray of his attention (or one of the rays of attention) is in his body.
Sensation- This is the simplest mental process, consisting in the reflection of individual properties of objects and phenomena of the material world, as well as the internal states of the body under the direct influence of material stimuli on the corresponding receptors.
Reflection- a general property of matter, which consists in the ability of objects to reproduce, with varying degrees of adequacy, signs, structural characteristics and relationships of other objects.
Receptor- a specialized organic device located on the surface of the body or inside it and intended for the perception of stimuli of different nature: physical, chemical, mechanical, etc., and their transformation into nerve electrical impulses.
Sensation constitutes that initial area of the sphere of mental cognitive processes, which is located at the border that sharply separates mental and pre-mental phenomena. Mental cognitive processes- dynamically changing mental phenomena, in their totality, provide knowledge as a process and as a result.
The term "sensation" has traditionally been used by psychologists to denote an elementary perceptual image and the mechanism of its construction. In psychology, they speak of sensation when a person realizes that a signal has been received by his senses. Any change in the environment that is accessible to sight, hearing and other modalities is psychologically presented as a sensation. Sensation is the primary conscious representation of a formless and objectless fragment of reality of a certain modality: color, light, sound, indefinite touch. In the area of taste and smell, the difference between sensation and perception is much less, and sometimes virtually none. If we cannot define the product by taste (sugar, honey), then we are talking only about sensations. If smells are not identified with their objective sources, then they are presented only in the form of sensations. Pain signals are almost always presented as sensations, since only a person with a very rich imagination can "build" an image of pain.
The role of sensations in human life is extremely great, since they are the source of our knowledge about the world and about ourselves. We learn about the richness of the surrounding world, about sounds and colors, smells and temperatures, sizes and much more thanks to our senses. With the help of the senses, the human body in the form of sensations receives a variety of information about the state of the external and internal environment.
internal environment.
The senses receive, select, accumulate information and transmit it to the brain for processing. As a result, there is an adequate reflection of the surrounding world and the state of the organism itself. On this basis, nerve impulses are formed that go to the executive organs responsible for regulating body temperature, the work of the digestive organs, movement organs, endocrine glands, for adjusting the sense organs themselves, etc.
The sense organs are the only channels through which the external world "penetrates" into human consciousness. The senses give a person the opportunity to navigate the world around him. If a person lost all senses, he would not know what is happening around him, he would not be able to communicate with the people around him, get food, and avoid danger.
And human emotions? It is to this question that we decided to devote today's article. Indeed, without these components, we would not be people, but machines that do not live, but simply exist.
What are the senses?
As you know, a person learns all information about the world around him through his own.These include the following:
- eyes;
- language;
- leather.
Thanks to these organs, people sense and see the objects around them, as well as hear sounds and taste. It should be noted that this is not a complete list. Although it is customary to call it the main one. So what are the feelings and sensations in a person in whom not only the above, but also other organs function? Let's consider the answer to the question posed in more detail.
Eyes
The sensations of sight, or rather color and light, are the most numerous and varied. Thanks to the represented body, people receive about 70% of the information about the environment. Scientists have found that the number of visual sensations (various qualities) of an adult, on average, reaches 35 thousand. It should also be noted that it is vision that plays an essential role in the perception of space. As for the sensation of color, it completely depends on the length of the light wave that irritates the retina, and the intensity depends on its amplitude or the so-called range.
Ears
Hearing (tones and noises) gives a person about 20 thousand different states of consciousness. This sensation is caused by the air waves that emanate from the sounding body. Its quality depends entirely on the size of the wave, the strength depends on the amplitude, and the timbre (or sound coloration) depends on the form.
Nose
The senses of smell are quite varied and very difficult to classify. They occur when the upper part of the nasal cavity is irritated, as well as the mucous membrane of the palate. This effect occurs due to the dissolution of the smallest odorous substances.
Language
Thanks to this organ, a person can distinguish between different tastes, namely sweet, salty, sour and bitter.
Leather
Tactile sensations break down into feelings of pressure, pain, temperature, and so on. They arise during irritation of the nerve endings located in the tissues, which have a special structure.
What feelings do a person have? In addition to all of the above, people also have feelings such as:
- Static (the position of the body in space and the feeling of its balance). This feeling occurs during irritation of the nerve endings, which are located in the semicircular canals of the ear.
- Muscular, articular and tendon. They are very difficult to observe, but they have the character of internal pressure, stress, and even slip.
- Organic or somatic. These feelings include hunger, nausea, breathing sensations, and so on.
What feelings and emotions are there?
Emotions and inner feelings of a person reflect his attitude to any event or situation in life. Moreover, these two states are quite different from each other. So, emotions are a direct reaction to something. This happens at the animal level. As for feelings, this is a product of thinking, accumulated experience, experiences, etc.
What feelings do a person have? It is rather difficult to answer unequivocally to this question. After all, people have a lot of feelings and emotions. They give the person information about the needs, as well as feedback on what is happening. Thanks to this, people can understand what they are doing right and what they are wrong about. After realizing the feelings that have arisen, a person gives himself the right to any emotion, and thereby he begins to understand what is happening in reality.
List of basic emotions and feelings
What are the feelings and emotions of a person? It is simply impossible to list them all. In this regard, we decided to name only a few. Moreover, they are all divided into three different groups.
Positive:
- pleasure;
- jubilation;
- joy;
- pride;
- delight;
- confidence;
- confidence;
- Delight;
- sympathy;
- love (or affection);
- love (sexual attraction to a partner);
- respect;
- gratitude (or appreciation);
- tenderness;
- complacency;
- tenderness;
- gloat;
- bliss;
- feeling of satisfied revenge;
- a sense of self-satisfaction;
- feeling of relief;
- anticipation;
- a sense of security.
Negative:
Neutral:
- astonishment;
- curiosity;
- amazement;
- calm contemplative mood;
- indifference.
Now you know how a person feels. Some to a greater extent, some to a lesser extent, but each of us at least once in our life experienced them on ourselves. Negative emotions that are ignored and not realized by us do not just disappear. After all, body and soul are one, and if the latter suffers for a long time, then the body takes on some part of its heavy burden. And it is not for nothing that they say that all diseases are from nerves. The influence of negative emotions on human well-being and health has long been a scientific fact. As for positive feelings, the benefits of them are clear to everyone. Indeed, experiencing joy, happiness and other emotions, a person literally fixes in his memory the desired types of behavior (feelings of success, well-being, trust in the world, people around him, etc.).
Neutral feelings also help people express their feelings about what they see, hear, etc. By the way, such emotions can act as a kind of springboard to further positive or negative manifestations.
Thus, by analyzing his behavior and attitude to the events taking place, a person can become better, worse, or remain the same. It is these properties that distinguish humans from animals.
It is difficult for me to understand my feelings - a phrase that each of us has encountered: in books, in movies, in life (someone's or my own). But it is very important to be able to understand your feelings.
The Wheel of Emotions by Robert Plutchik
Some believe - and perhaps they are right - that the meaning of life is in feelings. Indeed, at the end of life, only our feelings, real or in memories, remain with us. Yes, and the measure of what is happening can also be our experiences: the richer, more diverse, brighter they are, the more fully we feel life.
What are feelings? The simplest definition: feelings are what we feel. This is our attitude to certain things (objects). There is also a more scientific definition: feelings (higher emotions) are special mental states that are manifested by socially conditioned experiences, which express a long-term and stable emotional relationship of a person to things.
How Feelings Are Different from Emotions
Sensations are our experiences that we experience through the senses, and we have five of them. Sensations are visual, auditory, tactile, taste and smell (our sense of smell). Everything is simple with sensations: stimulus - receptor - sensation.
Our consciousness interferes with emotions and feelings - our thoughts, attitudes, our thinking. Emotions are influenced by our thoughts. Conversely, emotions affect our thoughts. We will definitely talk about these relationships in more detail a little later. But now let's recall once again one of the criteria of 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 the experience. This aspect of a person's emotional life is most clearly presented in the theory of differential emotions of the American psychologist K. Izard. He identified ten qualitatively different "fundamental" emotions: interest-excitement, joy, surprise, sorrow-suffering, anger-rage, disgust-disgust, contempt-neglect, fear-horror, shame-shyness, guilt-remorse. K. Izard refers the first three emotions to positive, the remaining seven - to negative. Each of the fundamental emotions underlies a whole spectrum of states, differing in their severity. For example, within the framework of such a single-modal emotion as joy, one can distinguish joy-satisfaction, joy-delight, joy-glee, joy-ecstasy, and others. All other, more complex, complex emotional states arise from the combination of fundamental emotions. For example, anxiety can combine fear, anger, guilt, and interest.
1. Interest is a positive emotional state that promotes the development of skills and abilities, the acquisition of knowledge. Interest-excitement is a feeling of being captured, curious.
2. Joy is a positive emotion associated with the ability to fully satisfy an urgent need, the likelihood of which was previously low or uncertain. Joy is accompanied by self-satisfaction and satisfaction with the surrounding world. The obstacles to self-realization are also obstacles to the emergence of joy.
3. Surprise is an emotional reaction that does not have a clearly expressed positive or negative sign to sudden circumstances. 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 obtaining reliable (or seemingly such) information about the impossibility of satisfying the most important needs, the achievement of which seemed more or less likely before. Suffering has the character of asthenic emotion and often takes the form of emotional stress. The most severe form of suffering is grief associated with irreparable loss.
5. Anger is a strong negative emotional state, which occurs more often in the form of affect; arises in response to an obstacle in the achievement of passionately desired goals. Anger has the character of sthenic emotion.
6. Disgust - 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, when combined with anger, can motivate aggressive behavior in interpersonal relationships. Disgust, like anger, can be self-directed, reducing self-esteem and causing self-condemnation.
7. Contempt is a negative emotional state that arises in interpersonal relationships and is generated by the mismatch of life positions, views and behavior of the subject with those of the object of feeling. The latter appear to the subject as vile, not corresponding to the accepted moral norms 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 real or imagined danger. Unlike suffering caused by direct blocking of essential 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 proceed 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 discrepancy between one's own thoughts, actions and appearance, not only to the expectations of others, but also to one's own ideas about appropriate behavior and appearance.
10. Guilt - a negative emotional state, expressed in the awareness of the improperness of one's own deed, thoughts or feelings and expressed in regret and repentance.
Table of feelings and emotions of a person
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 is taken from the site "Community of Dependents and Codependents", author - Mikhail.
All feelings and emotions of a person can be divided into four types. These are fear, anger, sadness and joy. You can find out what type this or that feeling belongs to from the table.
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And for those who have read the article to the end. The purpose of this article is to help you understand your feelings, in what they are. Our feelings depend a lot on our thoughts. Irrational thinking is often at the root of negative emotions. By correcting these mistakes (by working on thinking), we can be happier and achieve more in life. There is an interesting, but persistent and painstaking work on oneself. You are ready?
It will be interesting for you:
P.S. And remember, just by changing our consumption - together we are changing the world! © econet
"People eat when they are lonely, make love when they are angry, speak from the podium when they are sexually anxious. This perversion of the connection between sensation and behavior is evidence of alienation from oneself." I. Polster.
People often confuse sensations with feelings and feelings with emotions. Ask your friends: " What is the correct way to say: am I feeling hungry or am I feeling hungry? Is resentment a feeling or an emotion? And what about joy?"By asking these seemingly simple questions, you will receive varied and conflicting answers.
Unfortunately, in the psychological literature, these concepts are often confused. To my great surprise, after reading dozens of books by classics and contemporaries, hundreds of magazine articles, I never came across an integral system that clearly differentiates feelings, sensations and emotions and gives answers to their semantic differences! It would seem that there is nothing wrong with that, and you should not cling to words. It seems that there is no urgent need to draw clear and rigid boundaries between the meanings of related words. But this is only at first glance. A clear understanding of the meaning of these words and their differences is relevant for working with the human sensory sphere in all types of psychotherapy and is extremely important in areas such as gestalt, psychosynthesis and body-oriented psychology.
The differentiation of these concepts and the ability to differentiate them allows you to determine the place of violation in the relationship of a person with himself and the world and purposefully work with this.
Sensations are the process of obtaining information about the properties of objects, phenomena and about the internal states of the body. Information comes to us through sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, vestibular apparatus and kinesthetics (sensory information from muscles, tendons and ligaments). You can compare the sensations with the instrument panel and sensors in the cockpit, which show flight parameters: altitude, speed, air temperature, fuel level, wind direction and strength, fuselage tilt, distance to other objects, and much more. When I have a sore throat, I feel hot, sick, and heavy in my head, and these signs tell me that I am getting sick. If a person is deprived of sensations, then he will not be able to navigate in what is happening and will not be able to do anything purposefully.
The senses have a completely different function. If we compared sensations with the instrument panel showing flight parameters, then feelings can be compared with the pilot's personal assessment of these readings. I remember well that the illness on the eve of meeting my girlfriend caused me completely different feelings than the same illness on the eve of the physics test. Feelings are a process of personal assessment of the situation, which performs both signaling and organizational and guiding functions. They talk about a person's attitude to what is happening, show him whether it is good or bad. Thus, feelings play a double role: they are a system of signals of well-being or unhappiness, on the one hand, and a regulator of our desires and aspirations, on the other. And speaking in the language of Gestalt, then feeling is a holistic signal about the relationship between a person's needs and the environment. Feelings can carry a huge energy potential, but even so, you should not confuse them with emotions. Emotions are the external expression of our feelings, presenting them to the world around us. This is a non-verbal language of communication that appeared among our distant ancestors many hundreds of thousands of years ago. He helped to understand each other and interact successfully even before the emergence of articulate speech and verbal communication. Even higher animals are able to discern our emotional messages by tone of voice and facial expression.
Thus, despite the fact that feelings carry an emotional color and energy, they turn into emotions only when a person begins to present them to the world and people. As Lowen wrote: "To avoid confusion between these concepts, it should be noted that the word emotion implies activity (motion - movement and the preposition e-outward, outward)"... (A. Lowen. Psychology of the body) If, due to the strength of the experience or the inability to notice his feelings, a person immediately jumps into the field of emotions, unable to realize his feelings, then they say: "No feelings - only emotions"!
In summary, we can say that:
- sensations are information;
- feelings - how I feel about it (my assessment);
- emotions - how I react to it, and what I express by this (my reactions and messages to the world).
By looking at these concepts in terms of their function, it is easy to see their place on the contact cycle curve. It is difficult to overestimate their informational, evaluative and contacting role in the process of satisfying a need. I remember how many years ago, at one of the psychological trainings, I was struck by the question leading to one of the members of the group, whose name was Nastya: " Who are you crying to and what do you want from it? ". And her surprised answer:" Nobody and nothing, I just cry and that's it, I do so often". Later we managed to understand her feelings, and the address of her emotions, and what need she is trying to resolve with this. I was amazed that emotions are not an uncontrollable element, but our choice of action and resolution of the need, that emotions have an addressee and a specific goal Whether the crying person realizes this is another question.
Let us consider the sequence of the emergence and manifestation of the affective wave "sensation - feeling - emotion" on the example of the cycle of satisfaction of the needs of B. Reznik and T. Barley:
I. Stage of undifferentiation.
II. The stage of the formation of the figure.
III. The stage of focusing the figure.
IV. Field scanning stage.
V. Stage of resolution of the need.
Vi. Assimilation stage.
Vii. Stage of undifferentiation ".
The emergence of sensations, the increase in their intensity and the formation of a vague figure of need correspond to the level of sensations. Focusing the figure, identifying sensations and evaluating them gives rise to feelings, accompanied by scanning the field for satisfaction of the need - the level of feelings. The choice of the mode of action and the resolution of the need corresponds to the level of emotions. Then comes the second, control wave - the level of pleasant sensations - the stage of resolution. Withdrawal and assimilation - the level of feelings (satisfaction) and final emotions. Further - a temporary lull when the field is not differentiated. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Often, the violation of the cycle of satisfaction occurs due to a distortion of the perception of sensations, incorrect identification of feelings and the unconscious presentation of their emotional reactions. The situation is complicated by the speech patterns of the language, both Russian and the languages of the Romance group. Perhaps things are different in the East, but I cannot say with certainty. We say sensory organs instead of sensory organs; we say - "he expresses his emotions" - instead of saying: "he expresses his feelings", and about a person with poor emotional expression, we say that "he has few feelings." It turns out that we initially do not understand the role of sensations, we put feelings in their place, and we put emotions in place of feelings.
I want to repeat Polster's well-known saying: "L They eat when they are lonely, make love when they are angry, speak from the podium when they are sexually preoccupied. This perversion of the connection between sensation and behavior is evidence of alienation from oneself. "... (I. Polster, M. Polster. Integrative gestalt therapy)
If distortions at the level of sensations lead to such consequences, what happens when distortions also occur at the level of feelings and emotions? Feelings of hunger and loneliness, feelings of sex drive and emotions of anger. Having learned to distinguish between these concepts, the client will no longer confuse anxiety and hunger, fatigue and depression, attraction and love, confidence and aggression. The list goes on and on, and you yourself can remember some of the most striking examples from your practice.
To solve these and similar issues, it seems to me, you need to have:
- The skill of differentiating sensations, feelings and emotions based on their criteria.
- Sensations convey information about the situation inside and outside.
- Feelings are internal assessments, reactions and experiences.
- Emotions are the presentation of reactions and assessments to the world.
- The skill of noticing is being aware of the moments of transition of sensations into feelings, and feelings into emotions, and vice versa.
Here are some interesting exercises to help you gain practical awareness and differentiation skills.
- "List".
Make a list of feelings, emotions, and sensations as large as possible. You don't have to strive to do it in one go. It is best to do this exercise for several days - until you have an impressive list of 50-100 or even more items.
- "Sorting".
Break it down into two or three columns. I am deliberately not saying that there should be two or three. It depends on whether feelings and emotions will be included by you in one list, when one word, depending on the context, can have different meanings, or there are strictly deterministic words. For example, where would you take resentment? Panic? What about satisfaction?
- "Fitting".
Try every word on the list - feeling, feeling, or expressing it. Note what was easier for you and what was harder. Are there any names on the list that you did not manage to present and survive at all? During the day, it is useful to stop for a minute or two and "catch by the tail" of the experienced emotion, feeling or sensation, having realized and identified the "caught animal". Determine the strength and clarity of what you are experiencing, on a 10-point, 100% or any other scale convenient for you.
- "Pendulum of feelings".
Listen to yourself and be aware of your actual feeling at the moment. Stay with it for a while, and then go into the realm of sensations associated with this feeling, noticing and realizing place, strength, clarity and other parameters. Return to the area of feelings and see what new shades have arisen in the feeling, or whether it has changed completely. And then, starting from this feeling, go into the realm of emotions, noticing how you express them in movements, gestures, facial expressions and intonation. After a while, return again to the realm of feelings and realize what you are feeling now, what has changed and what has appeared.
- "Trouble zone".
When a person is worried about a problem, a zone of anxiety arises around it from feelings, sensations and emotions. On the one hand, in this area all experiences are stronger and sharper, and on the other, they are less clear and stable. It resembles a room of crooked mirrors, in which a person is distorted so that he looks like a skinny giant, then a wide dwarf, then walking upside down, then stretching forward like chewing gum. Noticing every day - realizing the strength and certainty of feelings, sensations and emotions in this problem area, you will be able to track the positive dynamics of changes in both the zone itself and the problem that gives rise to it. Working with an area in which improvements are slower, it is worth spending more time and effort.
Summing up, I will note that understanding the role and place of these phenomena, as well as the ability to differentiate them, is an important condition for awareness - noticing true feelings, sensations and emotions that will help the client see and restore violations of contact with an actual need. They are the most reliable indicator of the energy processes going on in a person when the field "organism - external environment" is "disturbed". Processes from the moment of the appearance of the first vague sensations to the moment of satisfaction of the need and its dissolution in the surrounding background. I am confident that as long as a person exists, any violation in the "Self" system is necessarily accompanied by greater or lesser changes in the sensory sphere both through the "Id" function and through the "Personality" function. If you run away from recognition and awareness, expecting that everything will work out automatically, by itself, then this will lead to the loss of the "Ego" function as a mechanism for assessing the situation, choosing and making adaptive decisions.
As Perls wrote: “To strive for maximum automatic functioning and minimal awareness - awareness - means striving for death before it comes” (F. Perls, P. Goodman, R. Hefferlin. Workshop on gestalt therapy).
