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Feelings are more immediate than emotions, they are easier to identify and are “faster”. You can also have only a few feelings at a time but your emotions are possibly composed of many more components. That is, you can have a feeling about a Frisbee, and you can have a feeling about a Frisbee game as well. But if you have emotions about the Frisbee game then in order to get those strong emotions there would have to be many things you are feeling about the Frisbee game. [Since emotions are deeper, they are harder to get to than feelings. The stronger the emotional experience, the deeper the emotion it is going to evoke. So something like a Frisbee game might evoke emotions, but just sitting on a couch might not.]

So one could think of emotions as just more than feelings. Emotions are greater than feelings and therefore they must have more parts in order to cause that greater feeling. Feelings are easy to understand because they are simple, but emotions are harder to understand because they are more complicated. A moody person would be described as emotional because emotion is a component of mood. Emotion is something that affects your entire system like a depression does. A feeling such as sadness is only an individual feeling and can be identified as such. [So our person sitting on the couch might be feeling happy, but this happiness is going to be limited because they aren't doing anything intense, so they might not be as emotional.]

If something is intense, then it is a feeling, emotions aren’t intense they are deep. They aren’t as intense as feelings but you could call them intense. Feelings are more intense because that is how we define feelings, if you can feel something then it is a feeling because, well, you “feel” it. Emotion is just something that affects you, your mood, how you are, etc. That is why feelings are easier to identify, because they are more intense. Emotions are deeper, however, when someone becomes emotional you can’t just snap out of it instantly, it hangs around in your system. That is why they are probably made up of more parts than feelings are. [The simpler the emotion, the faster it would probably take to process. You could dwell on something simple, but you'd probably have to be more interested in it for it to stick, instead of it hanging around naturally because you are trying to figure it out.]

Wilhelm Wundt from the 19 th century had a system which went from simple to complex feelings and then to true emotions. Complex emotions were analyzed in terms of various types of more minor feelings (Wundt, 1891). If you think about that it makes a lot of sense. Since emotions are stronger than feelings, it should be possible to describe your emotions with the feelings that make them up. For instance if you have the emotion hate, it is probably a result of many specific feelings of hate you have for whatever it is you are hating. The emotion hate is so strong that it must be made up of many smaller feelings that are all real and can be described. In fact, there is probably an overlap between various feelings and emotions all the time. If you are angry, you might be slightly irritated, upset, depressed or any combination of other feelings and emotions mixed in. Also, if you are experiencing a deep emotion, you might also be experiencing that emotion shallowly as well in a different way.

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Source:  OpenStax, A cognitive perspective on emotion. OpenStax CNX. Jul 11, 2016 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col10733/1.26
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