0.8 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts  (Page 18/89)

Your emotions change all of the time, only sometimes are you going to notice when an emotion changes or when you are experiencing one. Furthermore, you might want or expect to experience one emotion but you are actually experiencing a different one because unconsciously that is how you are responding. For instance, maybe you have an unconscious bias against a group of people so you feel hate when you interact with them, but you consciously think that you like those people and feel like you should be happy and positive towards them. A feeling might be important to your unconscious mind, or a feeling might be important to your conscious mind - in which case you would probably 'care' about it.

Your attention is constantly divided between various things in your environment, your own internal thinking and your own emotions. Your emotions are going to determine and assist what you pay attention to. For instance, if something is emotional in your environment for you, then more of your attention is probably going to spent thinking about or focusing on that thing.

Or maybe something in your environment is just more interesting than something else, the point is something in your environment or something in your head (emotions, thoughts) caused an intellectual or emotional reaction in you, and that then caused you to pay more attention to it. That doesn't mean that you notice it more after you pay attention - this type of paying attention might be unconscious - i.e. - more of your attentional resources or just more of the focus that people have (not all of which they are aware of) is going to be directed at it.

Intellect, cogntion and emotion

Humans have emotions - feelings are tangible while emotions are - or could be considered to be deep and complicated. The idea that feelings are tangible basically means that they could be more sensory or less intellectual and deep. Emotions are more powerful than feelings; however, they could also trigger the human intellect.

What would it mean for emotion to be powerful? Would that involve physical feelings? Physical stimulation can also be deep or shallow, emotional or intellectual. If the feeling (physical, emotional) is intellectual then it could be emotional or it could also be tied in with sensory feelings (say when you touch something).

What would it mean for something to be intellectual? Would that mean that it is different from the persons emotions? Emotions can be tied in with feelings - however that means that the emotion could be shallow and thought provoking or deep, or a strong emotion that is also deep.

It is important to distinguish deep feelings from sensory feelings. Deep feelings are probably intellectual - they are tied in with complicated cognitions which include memory processes, executive functioning (control of thoughts, ideas and images) and understanding concepts.

Concepts can also be emotional since they are intellectual or intelligent. A concept is like an idea only it is general or generic. An idea is something that occurs to someone while a concept could be the definition of an idea or the idea that the person refers to or already understood. Those deeper concepts can trigger emotions that are related to the idea or concept. A single concept could be powerful or significant to the person.