What are feelings? What are the feelings and what do they depend on?

One person asked if it was possible to help him get rid of the “incomprehensible feeling in his stomach, as if it were tickling,” which happens to him when he is nervous or talking emotionally. “It’s an unpleasant feeling,” he said, “I don’t like it, I want to remove it.”

This is a great question! Let's talk about where these sensations in the body come from and whether it is possible to do without them.

TL;DR / You will read here:

• Sensations in the body arise due to the release of hormones and other body functions
• This is normal, natural and it was intended that way.
• You won’t be able to get rid of the sensations, spend your time and effort on something else
• List of sensations in the body during different emotions

What is a feeling?

Sensation is a term that simultaneously describes the simplest psychophysical process and its result. During initial contact with the external environment, the senses receive, process, accumulate and transmit information to the brain. As a result of the influence of real objects on the senses, a subjective reflection of the individual properties of these objects or phenomena arises: the experience of sound volume, acuity of taste or other characteristics. In addition, sensations provide information about our body : position in space, temperature, and the functioning of internal organs. That is, sensations are our windows of perception, the main and only source of knowledge about reality.

Our senses are a unique sensory mechanism for detecting energetic, physical, chemical signals, on the basis of which we perceive and evaluate the environment. To build a classification, you need to combine different types of sensations according to a uniform principle. But given the richness of phenomenology, scientists identify different bases for classification:

• By types of analyzers : visual, auditory, olfactory, skin (tactile), vibration, pain, kinesthetic, static.
• By remoteness of influence : distant - those that appear at a distance (auditory, visual); contact, arising from direct contact (skin, taste).
• According to the anatomical location of the receptors : exteroceptive - on the surface of the body, proprioceptive - in the muscles, tendons or joints, interoceptive - on the internal organs.

Sensations are a constant element of a person’s daily life. All living organisms have them, and the sense organs of animals are sometimes more subtle than those of humans. But in people, sensations are included in the complex psychophysical process of perception and ideas about the world around them. Perception is a property of a person, a person . The process of perception includes the emotional background, well-being, general condition, mindset, past experience, memory, tendency to analyze or replace reality with fictitious images. Perception organizes sensations, transforms them into ideas and knowledge about the world around us.

The relationship between sensation and perception is so multifaceted that its study goes beyond the boundaries of one science. In the 21st century, problems are being intensively developed by science at the intersection of philosophy, natural science, psychology, physics, physiology, ecology, and linguistics. At the same time, new scientific directions are being formed: cyberpsychology, neurolinguistics, psychoprogramming, philosophy of artificial intelligence.

Take the perception type test

History of the concept.

The question of the study of sensations goes back to the origins of the intellectual history of mankind. Even ancient philosophers reflected on how a person cognizes the world outside himself. The first philosopher to describe the importance of observing the external world was Aristotle. In addition, he created the first classification of the five senses: hearing, vision, touch, smell, taste .

In the 17th-18th centuries, the idea of ​​the primacy of sensations for our cognition became dominant in the philosophical movements of empiricism and sensationalism. This is the English thinker John Locke with his theory of a “blank slate” of consciousness, where the experience acquired through the senses is recorded. This is the Irish spiritualist philosopher George Berkeley with an unexpected opinion for his time that the world around us is present only in human perception.

The modern interpretation of the philosophical trends of empiricism-sensualism focuses on the importance of sensory experience, the opposite of innate or acquired scientifically.

Simultaneously with the philosophical approach, scientific research methods changed. Initially, the patterns of human sensations were studied by physics and astronomy. Later, light and sound perception began to be studied by separate branches of science - optics, physiological acoustics. In the second half of the 19th century, the field of study shifted to psychology and physiology, on the border of which the physicist Fechner built a new science of psychophysics.

Table of human feelings and emotions. What feelings does a person have?

And I also want to show you a list of human 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 was taken from the website “Communities of Addicted and Codependent”, author - Mikhail.

All human feelings and emotions can be divided into four types. These are fear, anger, sadness and joy. You can find out what type a particular feeling belongs to from the table.

And for those who read the article to the end