Emotions, Feelings, Appraisals

Emotions, Feelings, and Appraisals

It should be a fairly easy task to define what an emotion is You've felt dozens of them every day, from minor irritations to experiences that made you smile. Anecdotally, we are very familiar with emotions. But only anecdotally. It's an untrustworthy rope that ties the anecdotal to the neurological. You need go no further than the English language to show how difficult anecdotal experiences are to characterize.

For example, take the basic word “emotions” and try to separate it from the word “feelings.” Are both of these different from the word “motivation”? What about the word “drive”? Or “appraisal”? Are the emotions of love different from the feelings of hunger for example? How are these related to survival drives?

Certainly, context matters. There have been many attempts to settle these definitional issues – but they still haven't been settled.

Some researchers do not believe in the concept of emotions at all, except at the obscure anecdotal level. To them, what we call emotions are simply patterns of electrical stimulation involving specific neural networks recruited for some survival purpose.Different patterns accomplish different things, but they're just patterns of activity. To them, distinctions between our feeling worlds and our thinking worlds are artificial.

According to Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, “emotions are automatic, largely unconscious behavioral and cognitive responses triggered when the brain detects a positively or negatively charged significant stimulus.” A positive stimulus might be realizing that you're falling in love. A negative stimulus might be realizing that you're falling off a cliff.

“Feelings are the conscious perceptions of emotional responses,” say Damasio and LeDoux. You become aware of various emotional responses your body and brain are cooking up in reaction to some stimulus. That awareness plus emotion equals feelings. This not the entirety of the data; it may not be the most accurate. The relationship between brain and body and the experience of emotions is fraught with controversy.

Another concept is that of evaluation, or appraisal, in emotional processing. From the appraisal comes the emotion, and then the feeling. It's a chain. However, not everybody agrees with that chain.

You do not see with your eyes; you see with your brain. Photo by Elena.