1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 11/74)

In review, both feelings and emotions are composed of unconscious thoughts, but feelings are easier to identify than emotions. Feelings are faster than emotions in terms of response (the response time of the feeling, how fast it responds to real world stimulation) and it takes someone less time to recognize feelings because they are faster. Feelings are closer to sensory stimulation, if you touch something, you feel it and that is a fast reaction. You care about the feeling so you can separate it out in your head from the other feelings. “You care” in that sentence could be translated into, the feeling is intense, so you feel it and can identify it easily. That is different from consciously understanding why you are depressed or sad. You can consciously understand why you are depressed or sad, but that might or might not affect the intensity of that sadness. [That brings up the idea that although thought clearly affects how much you are feeling, how much can thought affect emotion? Since emotion is deeper it is going to be harder to affect it with just thought than feelings are to affect. But if the thought is significant, or powerful, it could trigger strong emotions. Any thought can trigger a feeling, since feeling is shallow, but to pull someone's emotions it might take more.]

If the intensity of the sadness is brought up enough, then you can feel that sadness and it isn’t like a depression anymore, it is more like an individual feeling than something that affects your mood and brings your system down (aka a depression). Also, if you clearly enough understand what the sadness is then it is going to remain a sadness and not affect the rest of your system. That is because the feeling would get mixed in with the other feelings and start affecting them. The period of this more clear understanding of the sadness mostly occurs right after the event that caused the sadness. That is because it is clear to you what it is. Afterwards the sadness might emerge (or translate from a depression, to sadness) occasionally if you think about what caused it or just think about it in general. [So when someone says "I'm sad" that is different from saying "I'm depressed". Depression isn't like an emotion, it is something that is long term, that you notice a lowered mood, or many individual instances of sadness, but you cannot "feel" a depression like you feel an emotion, it isn't as real in real time.]

The difference between emotion and feeling is that feelings are easier to identify because they are faster, a feeling is something you are feeling right then. An emotion might be a deeper experience because it might affect more of you, but that is only because it is mixed into the rest of your system. That is, a depression affects more of you than just an isolated feeling of sadness. In other words, people can only have a few feelings at a time, but they can have many emotions at the same time. Emotions are mixed in, but to feel something you have to be able to identify what it is, or it is going to be so intense that you would be able to identify what it is. Emotions just feel deeper because it is all your feelings being affected at once. [At least, that is what it feels like is happening. A feeling is isolated and strong, but an emotion is more complicated and broad and far reaching.]