In class last night we had a lengthy discussion on how emotions differ from feelings; people had ideas, but no one seemed to be able to effectively get their point across to the rest of the class where they agreed. Often people use these words interchangeably, but when you study this in a little more detail, there is a difference between the two. And the most peculiar thing is that the difference is not very well defined. I’ll give you my understanding of the difference between the two, but I’d really like it if you could add your thoughts through the comments.
My understanding is that feelings are physiological responses to stimuli, where a physiological response involves the chemistry of your body, and a stimuli can be a thought, a external event or occurrence, someone’s words or touch, etc. Feelings are physical and chemical changes in your physiology – you feel love, anger, frustration, stress, and joy as a very real sensations in your body. Emotions, on the other hand, are the labels that we put on those sensations (happiness, love, anger, etc). So the two are closely related – no doubt – but they are not the same. First you have a stimulus, which creates a physical change in your body (a feeling), which we label with a name of a certain emotion.
Feelings are ‘absolute’, while emotions are ‘relative’. What I mean by that is that a given feeling is always the same (a feeling, again, being a certain physiological state of your body), but that same feeling can get a variety of labels from different people (called a number of different emotions). When I push on my desk, the desk pushes back (that would be equivalent to the feeling), but I can use several phrases to describe that behaviour (call it a number of emotions), like “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” or the “Newton’s Third Law of Motion”. They are different words describing the same overall idea.
Who knows, I may be out to lunch with this… what do you think?
Until next time,
V