The information in feeling

Some years ago, a man I had known for a long time came to me in the week he received a terminal diagnosis. He wanted to start exercising. I had spent most of my working life helping people use exercise to live with illness, and I thought I knew what to offer him: a program, a progression, a few numbers to watch.

What happened over the next year was not in any program I had written. We went on long bike rides. He tried kinds of training he had never done before. He got into the best shape of his adult life, until the illness took over. And on those rides, and in the hours around them, we talked: long conversations about what mattered, and long stretches when neither of us said anything at all.

I could measure what the training did for his body. I could not measure the rest of it. I never knew exactly what he was feeling on those rides, and I did not ask him to name it. What I saw was a man spending his last year with his family, outdoors, doing the things a working body lets you do. My own account of it, then and now, is that what helped him most was movement together with deep conversation and quiet presence. I believe that. I cannot prove it. This piece is, in part, my attempt to understand it.

The question that year left me with is not mainly about performance. It is about freedom: how our feelings widen or narrow our ability to act on purpose. Every section that follows answers some part of that question. Along the way I will ask whether the capacity to bring feeling, body, attention and the demands of a moment together is something that could be measured. I raise it here as a question and return to it at the end, after the evidence, as a hypothesis.

Here is the frame I will keep returning to, and it is the closest thing in this piece to a contribution of my own. Most of how we judge people asks one question: did it work? I think every performance, at work, in sport or in a life, deserves three. Did it work? What did it cost, in effort, sleep, health and relationships? And was it chosen, or was the person being driven by fear, habit or someone else’s expectations? A person can score well on the first for years while failing the other two, and look successful the whole time. Emotions bear on all three. I will argue that they bear on the third most of all, though that is my judgment, not something the research settles.

These are not three independent scores, and none is entirely within our control. Effectiveness can come at an unsustainable cost; agency can exist even when circumstances leave us few options. And agency is a matter of degree, not a switch. Human action is rarely completely free or completely compelled. By agency I mean the capacity to recognize what is influencing us and to respond in ways consistent with our values, within real biological, psychological and social limits. I offer the three questions not as a validated measure, but as three ways of asking whether a performance has served the person who produced it.

In an earlier piece, What Feelings Are For, I argued that emotions are signals with jobs rather than interference to be removed. If feelings carry information, then reading that information well is a skill. Is that skill a kind of intelligence? And what does it change: how well we perform, or how freely we live?

Aristotle saw the shape of the problem twenty-three centuries ago, in the line above. Anger is easy. Getting it right, toward the right person, in the right amount and at the right moment, is rare. He was writing about character, not intelligence, and he would not recognize the psychology below. But his point survives the translation: what counts is not whether we feel. It is how well the feeling fits the moment and what we do with it.

Here is where I come out, so you can argue with it as you go. The evidence supports a modest version of the claim, not the grand one. Skill with feeling predicts good things, though by less than the popular books suggest. Some parts of the skill have better evidence than the umbrella term that holds them. Much of it can be learned. And the strongest case for it is not about performance at all, but about how much of what we do is chosen, and how much is a feeling choosing for us.

The piece moves in five movements. The first asks what emotions tell us. The second asks how they help and hinder thinking. The third asks how they shape our freedom to respond, and what that means for happiness. The fourth follows the same question into the lives we share: trauma, love and work. The fifth asks what can be learned. I am a reader here, same as you, and fallible. Where the evidence is thin I will say so. Where I am guessing, I will label the guess.

First, what is an emotion?

Everything in this piece depends on two words, so they deserve more than a glossary line. Neither has a single agreed definition, and the arguments over them are real. But there is enough common ground to work with.

The most widely used definition comes from appraisal theory. Klaus Scherer describes an emotion as “an episode of interrelated, synchronized changes” across several of the body’s and mind’s systems, in response to an event judged relevant to something we care about.² He names five components: the appraisal itself, changes in the body, an urge to act, expression in face and voice, and the subjective feeling. In plain words, an emotion is the whole of you reacting, briefly and in a coordinated way, to something that matters.

Two things follow from that picture. First, a feeling, the part we are conscious of, is only one component. You can have the racing heart and the urge to flee before you have a word for what is happening. Second, every component is a possible entry point for skill. You can work on the appraisal (what does this mean?), the body (slow the breath), the expression, the urge, or the label you put on the feeling.

Emotion, mood, affect, feeling

These words get used interchangeably, and the confusion causes real arguments. Here is how I use them.

Not everyone agrees that the components travel together as neat packages. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion proposes that the brain builds each emotional experience in the moment, from body signals and learned concepts.⁴ A meta-analysis of more than two hundred laboratory studies found that heart rate, breathing and sweating did not clearly distinguish one emotion category from another.⁵ For this piece the debate has a practical upshot. A racing heart does not announce which emotion it belongs to, so the name we give it is a judgment, and judgments can be learned and revised. That is part of why skill with feeling is possible at all.

One more distinction matters for everything that follows. Emotion is not the same as emotional expression, and a calm face is not evidence of a calm interior. People can feel a great deal and show little, or show a great deal and feel less than it seems. Skill with feeling begins inside, with noticing, and only then concerns what we show.

Five families of feeling

If emotional skill starts with telling feelings apart, it helps to have names that mean something. Here are the nineteen emotions I wrote about in the emotion series for SportsFlow, grouped in the same five families. The families are a teaching framework of my own, not a recognized scientific taxonomy, and real feelings often blur across them. Storms are the hot, unpleasant states that mobilize. Mirrors are the emotions of comparison and self-judgment. Low skies are the slow, heavy ones. Rising airs are the pleasant states that lift and move us. Open weather is the pleasant states that widen us toward the world and other people.

Calm is missing on purpose. In that series I treated calm not as one more weather but as the sky the weather moves through. That image needs one clarification. It does not mean physiological calm, a slow heart and loose shoulders, which is simply another state, and often a useful one. It means something closer to what the contemplative traditions call equanimity: a steadiness of awareness that can sit alongside a racing heart, grief or anger. You can be shaking and still be the sky. More on that in the third movement.

The full field guide, with a definition of each of the nineteen, what it seems to be for and what happens when it takes over, is in the appendix at the end, for reference.

Three things stand out when you look at the nineteen together. First, the pairs. Fear and anxiety differ by time: one is about now, the other about later. Shame and guilt differ by target: the whole self or a single act. Envy and jealousy differ by what is at stake: something you lack, or something you could lose. Regret and disappointment differ by whom you blame: yourself or the situation. Learning to distinguish these pairs is one useful beginning of emotional differentiation: recognizing not merely that something is being felt, but what kind of feeling it is, what may have brought it about, and what it asks of us. Intensity, mixed feelings and change over time are the rest of the work.

Second, every unpleasant emotion on the list has a job, and every pleasant one has a way of going wrong. That is the case of the earlier piece in one table. No emotion is illegitimate to feel. But a feeling can be legitimate and still be misread, and a feeling can be accurate and still be unwise to act on. The questions are whether it fits the moment, whether we have read it rightly, and what is worth doing about it.

Third, the families move differently. Storms mobilize the body for action. Mirrors are about standing: mine, yours, ours. Low skies slow us down. Rising airs pull us toward a goal. Open weather opens us outward to the world and to other people. The rest of this piece is about learning to read all five.

What a feeling knows, and when to believe it

The strongest version of the claim that feeling is part of intelligence comes from neurology. In 1985 Paul Eslinger and Antonio Damasio described a patient, known as EVR, whose frontal lobe surgery left his measured intelligence superior. Yet his life fell apart. He could no longer meet personal or professional responsibilities, to the point that he was suspected of malingering.⁶ Damasio’s explanation became the somatic marker hypothesis: bodily signals tag options as good or bad, and without them, reasoning loses its bearings.

The famous test came in 1997. In a card game where two decks paid well early but lost money over time, ten healthy people began to show small anticipatory sweat responses before choosing from the risky decks, and shifted toward the good ones before they could say why. Six patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex never developed those responses, and some kept choosing badly even after they could describe which decks were risky.⁷

It is a beautiful story, and it has not held up as cleanly as it is usually told. When researchers asked players more sensitive questions, nearly everyone who was choosing well already knew enough, consciously, to explain the choice. They found no support for the idea that a gut signal arrived before knowledge.⁸ A major review concluded that the anticipatory signals replicate inconsistently and that the hypothesis needs more evidence to remain tenable.⁹ Another study found that poor performance on the same card game was not specific to the brain region the theory named.¹⁰

Here is what survives. Emotion is woven into how people value options. A 2015 review of decades of work called its effects on decisions powerful, pervasive and predictable, sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful.¹¹ The narrower claim, that a body signal routinely tells us the answer before our minds do, is contested.

Feelings that wandered in from somewhere else

Decision researchers distinguish feelings that belong to the choice in front of you from feelings carried in from somewhere unrelated. The first kind is information about the decision. The second is noise that feels like information.

The carried-in kind is real but often smaller than its reputation. In a well-known 2004 experiment, people shown a sad film clip were willing to pay more to acquire an ordinary object.¹² A 2018 replication found the sadness effect again (d = 0.40), and pooled with the original it came to d = 0.43, with a confidence interval running from 0.12 to 0.77.¹³ Real, modest, uncertain. The disgust effect from the same 2004 paper was not part of the replication.

The most famous example has fared worse. In a 1983 study, people phoned on sunny days reported more satisfaction with their whole lives than people phoned on rainy days, unless the interviewer first mentioned the weather.¹⁴ It became a textbook demonstration that mood is used as information. Thirty years later, an analysis of more than a million survey respondents found most daily weather conditions unrelated to life satisfaction, and the few effects that appeared were tiny.¹⁵ The idea that we sometimes read our mood as a verdict on our lives is still reasonable. The sunny-day study is not good evidence for it.

When to trust a gut feeling

The most useful rule I know on this comes from an unusual collaboration. Daniel Kahneman spent a career documenting how intuition misleads. Gary Klein spent one documenting how expert intuition saves lives. In 2009 they wrote a paper together to find where they disagreed, and mostly failed to. They concluded that intuitive judgments deserve trust under two conditions: the environment must offer valid cues, and the person must have had the opportunity to learn them.¹⁶ They added that how confident an intuition feels is not a reliable sign that it is right.

Notice what the rule does not say. It does not say feelings are wise, or that they are foolish. It says that an intuition about a learned pattern is only as good as the learning behind it. Emotions do other work as well, such as telling us what we need and what we value, and that work does not depend on expertise. A nurse’s unease about a patient, earned over thousands of shifts, is different from my unease about a stock.

Listening to the body

The body offers signals of its own, and some people seem to read them better than others. In a small study, London traders who counted their own heartbeats more accurately made more money and lasted longer on the trading floor, though the study could not establish cause.¹⁷ The measurement itself is under question: heartbeat-counting scores mostly reflect how much people under-count,¹⁸ and they track simply knowing what a typical resting heart rate is.¹⁹ The most useful result is the most honest one. Better heartbeat perception sometimes helped people decide and sometimes hurt them, depending on whether their bodily signals happened to favor the good choice or the bad one.²⁰ Hearing the body more clearly is not the same as the body being right. The skill lies in the hearing and then the weighing.

Appendix: a field guide to nineteen emotions

For each emotion, the table gives what it registers, meaning the situation it is a reading of; what it seems to be for when it is doing its job; and what happens when it takes over. Where a researcher’s definition is quoted, it is the one I found most useful, not the only one. Many of the “registers” lines come from Richard Lazarus’s core relational themes, a compact statement of what each emotion is about.²¹ The “for” and “takes over” columns are my synthesis of the research in this piece and its companion. Read them as working descriptions, not laws.