5.28 Levels of emotion and thought

I previously discussed how emotions were deeper than feelings, yet are “felt” less because it isn’t as obvious they are occurring because they are deeper and more intellectual. Emotions therefore involve more thought than feelings. Sensations are more related to feelings because they are simple things that don’t involve thought. So since feelings are less deep than emotions, could it be that certain emotions and feelings are more cognitive than others? Although feelings are more like sensations, they can be intellectual like emotions too. For instance, the feelings curiosity and frustration are both related to thought, but they are not deep enough to be emotions. Some emotions and feelings, however, are more primary (less related to thought) and related to instinctual reactions than others, which might make them more cognitive and intellectual. Since emotion, feeling and thought are mixed – and some of those are sometimes more intense than the rest – then it makes sense that some emotions might be more consistently less intellectual than others. I could say that immediate, shallow feelings are more instinctual than deep, pondering emotions and thought.

Silvano Arieti categorized emotions into three orders, the first order being the simplest emotions and the third order being the most complicated. He listed 5 types of emotions as first-order ones – tension – which he said was “a feeling of discomfort caused by different situations, like excessive stimulation and obstructed physiological or instinctual response”, appetite, fear, rage, and satisfaction and said that satisfaction was “an emotional state resulting from the gratification of physical needs and relief from other emotions”. (Arieti) He classified the first order emotions as being bodily, elicited by stimuli perceived to be positive or negative, have an almost immediate effect and if they have a delayed reaction the delay would be from a fraction of a second to a few minutes, and require a minimum amount of cognitive work to be experienced. Those emotions aren’t as simple as sensations, which consist of just feeling things without thought. To me those emotions also seem very strong, and perhaps they are strong because if someone is going to have an instinctual reaction, it is going to have to be strong to interrupt their thought process. So those more instinctual emotions interrupt thought because they are so strong and almost physical. In fact, small amounts of any of those emotions would make it possible for the person to reflect on the emotion because they aren’t being distracted by large amounts of it, therefore making the emotion less of a first-order emotion and more like a complicated emotion. If you take rage and think about your rage, you make rage into a complicated emotion and less like a simple emotion. You also make it into more a feeling since now it is shallower. So a full-blown rage would be much more instinctual than just having a little rage, the small amount of rage is more controlled and initiated by cognition, whereas the large rage was triggered instinctually (or more basically, emotion is more instinctual and powerful and distracts from thought).