Feeling: Its Nature and Content

Abstract

We all agree that feelings and emotions play an important part in human life. What distinctive part(s)? Straightway we become aware of the variety, let alone ambiguities, in our everyday usage of the terms--by no means removed by scholarly analyses of the nature of feeling and emotion and of the difference they make to knowing and behaving. In 1937, William McDougall began his monograph, The Organization of the Affective Life. A Critical Survey, with the words: “The psychology of the affective life is still so backward, so chaotic, there is so much diversity of opinion and of theory, that we have no approach to a generally accepted terminology.”1 In 1965, Edward J. Murray, noting at the beginning of Motivation and Emotion that there was some question as to whether motivation and emotion are different areas, goes on to say that some psychologists “would eliminate motivation and emotion entirely as a topic for general psychology” since “they regard the subject as the last refuge of the humanists, the vitalists, and teleologists.”2 That the situation among other psychologists was still no different in 1970 is clear from the essays in Feelings and Emotions, edited by Magda Arnold.3 They indicate that the terminological uncertainties that prevail are the effect of different conceptions of the task of psychological science, of the ideal of truth, and of other related issues.