feeling

feeling, in psychology, the perception of events within the body, closely related to emotion. The term feeling is a verbal noun denoting the action of the verb to feel, which derives etymologically from the Middle English verb felen, “to perceive by touch, by palpation.” It soon came to mean, more generally, to perceive through those senses that are not referred to any special organ. As the known special organs of sense were the ones mediating the perception of the external world, the verb to feel came also to mean the perception of events within the body. Psychologists disagree on the use of the term feeling. The preceding definition accords with that of the American psychologist R.S. Woodworth, who defines the problem of feeling and emotion as that of the individual’s “internal state.” Many psychologists, however, still follow the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in equating feeling to states of pleasantness and unpleasantness, known in psychology as affect.

Because of the essentially internal, subjective nature of feeling, its study has been concerned with two distinct problems—namely, how an event is perceived and what the perceived event is.

Study of internal sensitivity

At the turn of the 20th century, German psychologists Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener suggested that the elementary psychological states that make up consciousness, such as sensations, images, and feelings, can be observed and analyzed by experimentation. In 1846 the German physiologist E.H. Weber distinguished only two senses in addition to sight, hearing, taste, and smell, whereas the American neurologist C.J. Herrick in 1931 distinguished 23 classes of receptors involved in such additional senses. Much information has been gained on the perception of relatively simple localized stimulation within the body. It is known, for instance, that moderate increases in temperatures of the skin are perceived as warmth, moderate decreases as cold, checkerboard combinations of moderate increases and decreases as heat, and intense increases as pain. Comparable information has not been gained, however, on the perception of such presumably widespread and heterogeneous internal states as the emotions.

Perception of emotions

A milestone in the psychology of feeling was the American psychologist William James’s theory of emotion, which held that physiological changes precede emotion. Subsequent evidence indicates that the theory is essentially correct in that there is an internal sensory basis for feeling. More recent work has demonstrated an interaction between physiological arousal and cognition in determining emotional expression.

If emotion is in part a perception initiated by bodily responses, it is obviously desirable to know what these responses are. The best single answer to this question came from the work of the American physiologist W.B. Cannon, who in a long series of experiments was able to show that the major emotions involve excitation of the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system and that such excitation, because of the diffuse conduction, gives rise to a widespread set of specific responses of smooth muscles and glands—increase in heart rate, increase in blood pressure, inhibition of peristaltic movements, increased perspiration, and many others. Compare emotion.