Basic Feelings

Have you ever listened to yourself talk to others when you are relating a certain experience that affected you?  In narrating your story, do you hear what kind of feeling words you use?  In many of our conversations, feelings are an implicit part of our message, meaning that we don’t necessarily say our feeling but only imply it by means of our tone of voice and nonverbal expressions (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, etc.).  Whereas most of the people we talk to will be able to pick up on the emotional tone of our message, many of us do not explicitly state how we feel or felt. 

Being able to express our feelings and giving them specific names can have several benefits.  For one, naming our reaction to a particular experience or event enables us to put meaning into this part of our lives.  This meaning often results to a greater understanding of ourselves and the way we see ourselves reacting to external circumstances.  For another, being able to identify an emotional reaction can lead us to specify a detail in our experience that held particular significance for us.  This makes us gain an understanding of when and what really made us react the way we did.  Finally, admitting our reaction can help us decide how we are going to react to the specific circumstances that we are experiencing.  This step is often the difference between merely reacting to one’s situation and purposively expressing one’s emotions. 

In order for us to be able to express our feelings adequately, we need to build our vocabulary for feeling words.  Researchers studying emotions believe that there are only a handful of basic feelings that are universally experienced.  This means that the feelings that people experience anywhere in the world are only made up of a few basic elements.  Other emotional reactions are said to be combinations of these basic feelings.  Much of what we know in this area is a product of research done by psychologists Paul Eckman, Nico Frijda, and their colleagues.  Some of the basic feelings that have been included in these lists are as follows:  happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, shame and desire. 

For most of us Filipinos who are bilingual, we need to understand the various feeling words that different languages we know are able to convey.  Many of us will be convinced that that certain words in a particular language can better convey our meaning and experience.  We also need to be sensitive to these personal preferences. 

We can thus begin our journey of better emotional awareness by familiarizing ourselves with these fundamental emotional experiences.  We can ask ourselves how and when do we have these reactions?  To what extent are we able to anticipate and manage them?  What is easiest for us to identify and what are the most difficult to manage?  We can then observe ourselves incorporate these words the next time we are talking about our experiences to others.