Feeling

PSYCHOLOGY

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 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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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.

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.