The Origin of Universal Human Emotions

In the social sciences, feelings are referred to as “affect,” and there are many confusions between the terms “emotions,” “feelings,” and “affect.” One reason for this is that humans experience a wide range of feelings – such as being tired, bored, sleepy, excited, hungry, angry, afraid, sad, ashamed, proud, embarrassed, happy, or jealous, and much of it is called “emotion.” Indeed, feelings are an important part of everyone’s psychology because they are our private readouts of internal processes, informing us without words how we evaluate the world around us and events that happen to us, and what may be going on in our bodies. They are windows to our souls. And, feelings and emotion are aspects of mental life that all humans have a lifetime of access to, and a lifetime of contemplating the proper words to describe nuances of an inner physiological state or sensation. Thus it is not surprising that people lump “emotions” and “feelings” all together in one messy category.