1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 14/74)

So people can basically only “feel” or focus on small amounts of feeling. If it is a feeling that is very large it becomes an emotion with more parts. It isn’t that this emotion isn’t as deep as the feeling, it is actually deeper, but you simply cannot comprehend the entire emotion at once to “feel” it like you feel feelings. You can bring up feelings from memory (by thinking about sensory stimulation) but those types of feelings are going to be less direct and therefore more like emotions (less intense) than current, direct sensory stimulation that you are feeling in the real world. [Since it is easier to focus on feelings, they are probably are going to be easier to identify too. Maybe all emotion is really feeling. Maybe when you think about your emotions, they become feelings because then you can feel them because you're thinking about them. And when you think about emotions you were having in the past (not current real time) then you feel them too, and have the misconception that they were feelings and you were feeling them, but really they were more dulled down because you weren't thinking about those emotions as much as you are now. So maybe emotion is more of an unconscious experience than feeling, which is more conscious. Since feeling is more conscious, it is more a function of conscious thought. Thought is a period of attention to something, and since you pay attention to feelings, it is almost like you think about your feelings consciously. That differs from emotions, which, since they are deeper and less "in touch" with your conscious mind, it is like you are thinking about them unconsciously. So any feeling, emotion, you could say you "feel" it or "think" about it, the two are almost the same. The difference is that when you are "thinking" about it you are slightly more consciously aware of it because you are paying it more attention then when you are just "feeling" it. That shows how feelings are shallower than thought. However, emotions can be very deep and meaningful, they just aren't completely consciously understood. In fact, since emotions are harder to figure out than feelings since they are more complicated and deeper, most of what people see when you look at you are probably emotions, since you are mostly made up of deep emotions, you're just not feeling them all the time. Someone would have an "emotional makeup" that determines who they are, not a "feeling makeup", because feelings are more short term and shallow, something like, "I felt that" versus "That is an important part of me".]

Just as feelings can generate emotions, emotions can also generate feelings. For example, something like a fly buzzing might generate the feeling of annoyance, and this feeling might generate the emotion sad. You respond to the feeling first because feelings are faster and more immediate than emotions. An example of an emotion generating a feeling would be being sad that you are depressed. The depression is more of an emotion than the sadness because it is deeper and "slower" but the sadness is more like a feeling because it can be more immediate (it can also be an emotion, but in this example it is a feeling). [Feelings and emotions are going to be mixed in a lot too, like most feelings probably feel emotional to some extent.]