Topic: Difference between feelings and emotions?

My reactions are delayed. I don't get upset at losing a game.

But when someone says something and I don't like it, it takes me 48 hours to sometimes a week to discover I am "upset" about it. My mom gets angry at this. She doesn't realize it takes me awhile to process. She said, "If you can't tell me at the time, then don't tell me a week later."

This is frustrating. I've had to deal with this my entire life. My feelings don't matter because I cannot bring them up "at the time it happened."

@airlau I also experience some emotions clearer than others. I do not think that the place in the brain has anything to do with it. It is rather how you were brought up, or what you consider inappropriate. If you were not brought up with affection, it will be hard to recognise and to give. If anger was/is forbidden, then you will not allow yourself to feel the anger. Something like that.
@DXS I have the same delay in realising that I am angry. About three days, sometimes. That does not mean that I become upset only then, but I only understand the emotion that late. (And then I get angry at myself for having been, or still being, angry.) But I think it is a learning process and that with time I get better at it. I am glad I now understand it is anger. I discovered it by elimination, basically.

When you finally realize it three days later, but the person has forgotten or won't talk about it because "you should have brought it up at the time." Well, I couldn't. I didn't realize I WAS angry. It took me three days to process.

You never get to resolve your anger.

My mom squashed all fights in our family, so anger was never allowed.

I have that delayed response thingy too....but is it real anger or an is it a conditioned response. IM getting to the point where thinking about this has become frustrating, I'm feeling anxiety? Well everything seems to be giving me that now days. I need a break from all this thinking...my brain is starting to default in an unhealthy way. and I'm not able to process any more Information...totally off topic...sorry...happened in the middle of trying to answer your post..

I have always believed a delayed response to anger was healthy. In fact I consider it a gift we as humans have. Anger an animal and it responds immediately, as do some people. As humans we can delay our response and act accordingly. The interesting thing is with the delay we now have choices. Since I have been made aware of this I never anger spontaneously. I stop a think things over . Now more often or not I find the event not worth worrying about and either let it slide or approach the person with a learned approach eg " You know the other day you said ----- I felt sad that you saw things that way but I realize I probably misinterpreted what you said." or similar. But now now When I get angry I ask myself " what am I actually angry about" and you know what I have noticed more often than not it is a believe I have that their comment has shaken. Something I think may be right but I don't want it to be. Now I make a personal note of this believe that has been shaken and I have found more often than not it is comments about the same believe each time which cause the anger and I realize it is time for me to take a closure look at the problem. If I truly had alexithymia there would be no anger as such because true alexithyhia personal I am told and have witnessed show very little sign of this emotion

For me its like, I get physical sensations of emotions and I just have to guess what they are. Like when I'm going to a haunted house or a rollercoaster, I get bursts of emotions but I cannot tell what they are? Like am I scared? or excited? Even before I learnt about this word I would tend to ask myself like what I am feeling. Like emotions for me is just. Certain things I feel that I need to decipher for myself what it is. Feelings sounds awesome though. I don't understand like, does it mean that people are usually able to tell like. Oh I'm nervous. Or, Oh I'm disappointed? like, they don't have to think about it? Cause these feelings are kinda just like. Idk, to me its like, a word to describe different like, heart beat races or stomach aches or something.

airlau,
Those things you call basic feelings, are emotions. The four emotions are

1. Happiness
2. Anger
3. Sadness
4. Surprise

If you take any of those online facial expression tests you'll notice that fear looks just like surprise, so the test author usually adds an extra facial expression feature to one or the other to distinguish them apart; ditto for anger/distaste.

Another member of this site said he thinks that most emotions don't really exist, that they are just intellectual constructs; I agree. Maybe it's legitimate to look at an emotion as a class in a program; e.g., consider the emotion class, surprise inherits from emotion. emotion has a property called context, therefore surprise has this property (because of inheritance). Say you modify the value(s) for context and instantiate a new surprise ; name it fear. You might have a fear interface that can only be applied to the surprise class; it has a context override. Maybe you have a bunch of interfaces that can be applied to all or several of the emotions. Maybe you can apply new interfaces to your different inherited classes.

I'm not worried about the possibility of creating (or finding) new emotions. I think anybody who has a solid grasp of the four emotions, doesn't have Alexithymia.

Dave

I have the same issue I get angry? I guess, when things tick me off but there's no actual emotion. it's a reaction that dies quickly.
I enjoy thinking as it's my most common pass time now that video games have started boring me. I've come up with a system I use when explaining my feelings to people as I've given up on emotions. First feelings like anything are a reaction to stimuli. You start with the core system and stimulate it in different ways those being the frequency and intensity of input. From there there's two main branches up and down. Up is anticipation, excitement, happiness, joy love all names for differing energy levels. Down is anitisipation, disruption of expectations, disappointment, irritation,anger,hate the dark side of bad internet references.
I've often described anger to my therapist as a fly that won't go away irritating you over and over till you want to rip its wings off and grind it under your shoe. But as high feelings are draining they die just as quickly as boiling water in a pool, eventually evening out.
I am curious as to what others opinions are to this system wether it's good, bad, stupid and what not any ideas as to refine it further or overall improve it are most welcome