feelings |
Working Definition:
an aroused state often accompanied by physiological changes
Disciplinary Definitions:
feeling: 1. most generally any conscious state or experience. 2. specifically an affective, or emotional, state. 3. (Titchner) one of the elements of consciousness. The primary dimension of feeling is pleasantness-unpleasantness. Chaplin, Dictionary of Psychology.
a subjective state in which persons are aware
of the positive or negative quality of their reactions to events. Feeling
is primarily the perception of pleasure or unpleasure, of being in a positive
state or a negative one. 1. sentience. sensating. Experiencing a sensation
in itself apart from any direct reference to the object producing it or
to the perception of which it is a part. Feelings are regarded as pure
subjective states that reveal aspects of the subject's consciousness but
not (necessarily) the qualities of its source. Angeles, Dictionary of Philosophy
Comments:
the term is used in relation to the term emotion. In this context, feelings are uninterpreted states (Angeles first sense of the term) and are less complex than emotions. Although feelings are associated with particular emotions (Angeles 2nd sense), e.g., guilt as in "I feel guilty about X," as a rhetorical term, it is restricted to sensations of whose quality a person is aware but which are yet to be cognitively determined. In statements about feelings like "I feel guilty," the negative sensation of which the speaker was aware is now interpreted--an emotion is attributed to the sensation of feeling good or bad. This reaction, in rhetorical situations, arises from the circumstance that persons are "positioned" in the discourse of their interlocutors. When a person is so positioned, and reacts to the positioning intuitively as untenable/bad or tenable/good, then it can be said that the response is motivated by feeling a bad or good emotion. These two primary ranges of feelings are linked to acts of fighting/fleeing and embracing/desiring whose general forms are the dynamic of acceptance or rejection, affirmation or negation, and so on. In the middle range, the quality of the feeling is ambivalent and usually associated with the experience of anxiety.
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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