Psychology of Feeling

FEELING, PSYCHOLOGY OF. The word "feeling" is as one psychologist has remarked, a "psychological maid of all work." A thing "feels" hot, sharp, brittle or clammy, while we ourselves "feel" tired, hungry, happy or irritable. Even in psychol ogy the term has been hard worked in many directions. But in the vast majority of modern writers it is used with special reference to one only of the three kinds of process into which mental life is now usually classified—that part which deals with "feeling" in the narrower sense, as distinct from "knowing" or "wishing." In this sense it is sometimes also called "affection" and is contrasted with "cognition" and "conation." What are the feelings in this sense? Are they unique mental processes or can they be analysed into simpler elements? This is a question which has played a prominent part in psychological discussion. On the whole, modern opinion inclines to the view that they are unique. The only forms of the opposite view which have any serious influence to-day are those which connect feeling in some way with sensation. Three theories of this kind deserve mention.

The James-Lange

. According to the first, feel ing consists of various obscure and confused experiences, which upon attentive analysis reveal themselves as diffused sensations from various parts of the body. It is some such view as this that is implied in the famous James-Lange theory of the emotions—a theory which is held by few if any living psychologists, but which is treated with respect by very many. William James, whose bril liant championship is responsible for this respectful attitude, held the view explicitly only as regards the emotions, but C. G. Lange held it with reference to the feelings generally. For a full discus sion, see JAMES-LAN GE THEORY.

Pain.

(2). According to the second theory, the sensations in question are of a more specific kind; pleasant feelings can be analysed into a diffused sensation of tickling or a weak sensation of (sexual) "lust"; while unpleasantness is nothing else but a low intensity of pain. Now the strength of this theory obviously lies in its account of unpleasantness, and linguistic evidence certainly speaks strongly in its favour; for do we not speak of pain as occasioned both by the death of a dear friend and by a blow upon the shin? But there seems little doubt that language here is guilty of a confusion and that the two experiences are of quite a dif ferent order and do not merely differ in intensity. Physiological evidence indicates that pain has its special end organs in the skin and in the interior of the body, it has its special tract in the spinal cord, and there are probably portions of the body (such as the cornea and the dentine) from which no sensation other than pain can be elicited. And yet any sensation, any kind of experience whatsoever, can be disagreeable. Unpleasantness cannot therefore be identified with pain, and the strongest support of this theory falls to the ground.

The abandonment of this theory has, however, landed English speaking psychologists in a serious terminological difficulty. If it is incorrect to speak of unpleasant feeling as "pain," what single substantive word can we employ to designate this kind of feeling as antithetical to "pleasure"? A recent coinage, which we shall here employ, is "unpleasure." Feeling as an Attribute.—(3). The third theory that con nects feeling with sensation can be briefly disposed of. It regards feeling not as itself a sensation but as an attribute of sensation, in the same way that quality, intensity or duration are attributes. To this theory has been objected that feeling has itself these very attributes, and is not, like them, an ultimate phase of an elemen tary process. Furthermore it is said that feeling is different from the genuine attributes in that these latter are essential to the very existence of sensation (e.g., a sensation without duration is no sensation), whereas there do exist "indifferent" sensations. Al though this second argument is capable of being disputed (for it seems possible that delicate introspection might always reveal some degree of feeling), the combined effect of the two objections has proved so strong that the theory of feeling as an attribute of sensation is now seldom seriously advocated.

The discussion in the above paragraphs of the view that the feelings have some special relation to sensation has served to clear away certain important preliminary difficulties. Returning now to the more widely held view that feeling is a unique mental element, we may ask what further criteria of its uniqueness there are in addition to its unanalysability. Many supposed peculiari ties of feeling have been noted but 'those which have withstood criticism with any degree of success may be reduced to four : (i.) Feeling may be experienced in connection with any kind of mental process whatsoever; (ii.) Feelings have no images corre sponding to the image in the sphere of sensation. A revived feeling is a fresh feeling, e.g., comparable to a fresh perception of an object rather than to an image of that object "in the mind's eye"; (iii.) Feelings do not stand in associative relation to one another. When they appear to do so, it is only in virtue of the accompanying perceptions and ideas, between which alone do genuinely associa tive links exist ; (iv.) Feelings lack clearness in the sense that they tend to disappear if we attend to them. This has been much dis puted but recent searching experiments by A. Wohlgemuth seem to show that this is strictly true. But a word of caution is needed. If we attend to a whole affective experience, we increase the feel ing ; concentration on an aching tooth only makes the pain less tol erable, but if we succeed in attending to the feeling itself (as dis tinct from the other aspects of the total experience) we find that the feeling tends to vanish even as we grasp it.

Accepting provisionally the current view of feeling as an ele mentary process, how many kinds of feeling are there? The .great majority of contemporary psychologists hold that there are only two—pleasure and unpleasure. Some others however have refused to admit that there are so few, and at first sight we might well be inclined to agree with them. Can the very varied and manifold feelings that we experience in toothache, in intense fatigue, in winning a game, in falling in love, or in leaping from a burning house, really be reduced to these two simple kinds? Most psychologists hold that they can, and that the seeming variety is due either to differences in the attributes of the feeling (e.g., their intensity and duration), or to differences in the accompanying ideas, sensations or wishes, and not to differences in the quality of the feelings themselves. One theory of a contrary kind has how ever attained sufficient celebrity to necessitate a mention. This is the so-called tri-dimensional theory of Wilhelm Wundt, accord ing to which there are not two but six kinds of feelings, arranged in three pairs of opposites as follows :—Pleasure—unpleasure, excitement—calm, tension—relaxation. Although early experi ments brought some evidence in favour of this theory, later work has shown fairly conclusively that the two last named pairs are not elementary and unanalysable, as are the members of the first pair, but correspond rather to different strengths of conation and different intensities of muscular strain, and to combinations of these with pleasure and unpleasure.

According to the most generally accepted view then, pleasure and unpleasure are the only kinds of feeling; pleasures and un pleasures, moreover, do not differ qualitatively among themselves. Such apparent differences are entirely due to the varying cogni tive and conative events that accompany them.