Feelings

Abstract

Feelings are partitioned into emotional feelings (responses to external stimuli), feelings of pleasure and pain, feelings associated with drives (responses to body states, such as hunger or thirst), and feelings that accompany certain cognitive operations. The James–Lange theory of emotion is introduced, which casts emotion as feelings of the body’s response to an external stimulus: when you encounter a bear, your feeling of fear is actually a feeling of the body’s reaction, such as tensed muscles, baited breath, and increased pulse. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying pleasure, pain, drives, and cognitive feelings are then reviewed, the conclusion being drawn that, like perception and memory, emotional feelings involve directed modular pathways that project to the frontal lobes, especially the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices.