Such questions constitute a philosophical or 'meta-psychological' exploration, the ultimate purpose of which is to find an adequate explanation as to how the individual's experience, structured in a sophisticated and complex fashion, can be said to be SELF-organizing even though some aspects of the process remain outside of the sphere of the individual's explicit awareness and beyond the scope of his or her deliberate intentions. According to level-three theorists, feeling plays a key role in accomplishing this nearly miraculous feat.

In this paper we shall begin by surveying descriptions gleened from the literature about the part that feeling - as the mode in which we subjectively experience the unconscious processes that are involved in higher level mental accomplishments - plays in individual creativity. Only then shall we turn our attention toward investigating the impact that a deeper understanding of the relationship between consciousness, feeling, attention and so forth has on level-three theorizing about the nature of feeling and emotion.

The Role of Emotion in Creative Self-Organization

In level-three theories of emotion, the feeling function is conceived as integral to our capacity for organization. McGinnies, for example, states that 'emotion appears to represent a highly organized and directed state of the organism'. And Stratton, writing on 'sthenic' emotions, finds that these 'increase our adequacy' and 'supplement our routine modes of response'. [218] ³

Emotion also facilitates change in the individual - transformations that qualify as systemic 're-organizations'. This is possible because feeling states function in an integrative fashion, organizing and re-organizing our experience into coherent 'wholes'. Not only is this integrative function exhibited in our capacity to combine information from various sources, but in our ability to synthesize new models, frameworks, and paradigms. [246].

The 'dis-order' that is characteristically associated with feeling in level-one theory is, at level-three, associated instead with a de-constructive phase of a basically positive, RE-constructive process that is orchestrated by feeling:

... The disorder is not emotion, but due to a conflict ... between the old and the new, or to the breakdown of the non-serviceable old form. Thus emotion comes out of this position quite clean and orderly. It is 'highly organized' (McGinnies), 'increases our adequacy' (Stratton), and 'produces ORGANIZATION' (Leeper). [218-19]

Emotion is, at level-three, conceived in a primarily positive way. When successful, it 'makes whole' - achieves a transformation into organized wholeness. And so, says one theorist, it is 'affective contact' that is 'the first level of healing'. [275] Furthermore,

Emotion is itself change... TRANSFORMATION. ... Emotion is not just a change in conscious representations, but a transformation of them in terms of symbolic reality. [278]

As such, emotion plays a significant role in the capacity of individuals to make 'paradigm shifts'. If, as is sometimes said, emotion is indeed our natural response to the organism's experienced need for change, it can be said that this response typically occurs at a subliminal level, outside of the scope of explicit awareness:

When the organism must be transformed if it is to survive, emotion appears on the scene. ... To speak accurately, change is always going on and every moment involves survival, thus emotion qualifies all experience. But such continuous adjustments are subliminal; one commonly calls only the more drastic ones emotion. [279] ⁴

Although much of the self-organizational activity that occurs in the organism happens at an 'unconscious' level, we have access to these processes through feeling and emotion. The 'subtler' adjustments that the above paragraph implies are commonly associated - in level-three theory - with the word 'feeling', while the word 'emotion' tends to be treated as feeling that has intensified to the extent that it has succeeded in attracting the subject's attention.

Like feeling, however, emotion is also sometimes seen by level-three theorists as contributing to a kind of unconscious creative work that takes place in a dynamic and 'spontaneous' fashion, outside of our explicit awareness:

Emotion as creative organization can be understood upon two different models. The first considers emotion to serve the general homeostatic balance of the organism; it appears when there are problems, conflicts, inadequacies, emergencies in order to restore and conserve natural equilibrium. It organizes and motivates behavior into a new pattern of response and adaptation compensatory to the old. Creative works of art, morality and religion would not occur if the natural organism were in balance.

The second way considers emotions as creatively dynamic, spontaneous, going beyond the system of equilibrium by producing the totally new, in what Kierkegaard might call a 'qualitative leap'. The need to which it refers, as mentioned in connection with Maslow's statements, is not homeostatic but self-actualizing. Man, on the former view, is a creature of Nature within whose wisdom emotion finds a place. On the latter view, man is a creator who finds in emotion the place of the Spirit. [230]

This level-three view lends itself to understanding emotion and feeling as forms of naturally-occuring self-administered 'therapy', a kind of spontaneous healing-meditation that happens without planned intent when the organism is blocked or operating in a way that is dysfunctional. In contrast to level-one theory - which conceives of emotions as something we need to be cured OF - level-three conceives of emotion AS the cure. This entails using the feeling function in a comparatively advanced manner. The individual consciously ENABLES the emotion to unfold, and FOLLOWS this process in a way that permits the feeling function to do its rightful work:

Here, there is nothing to seek out nor any particular way in which to express and create. This prescription is the simplest and the most difficult, for it consists solely in following the emotions in daily occupation, allowing them to transform life just as it comes, into a creative process of self-realization. [228]

Associated with this notion of emotion as therapeutic process is the view that there are particular types (or levels) of emotion which occur only when the feeling function's CREATIVE (self)-organizing work achieves its ultimate goal. These are the more 'profound' or 'inspired' emotions that are thought to accompany creative enterprises in the arts and sciences. Witness what mathemacian Jacques Hadamard had to say about these in his book, Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field :

It may be surprising to see emotional sensibility invoked a propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interet only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know, and surely it belongs to emotional sensibility. That an affective element is an essential part in every discovery or invention is only too evident, and it has been insisted upon by several thinkers... [page 30]

Indeed, I know by personal experience that powerful emotions may favor entirely different kinds of mental creation (eg, the mathematical one); and in this connection, I should agree with this curious statement of Daunou: 'In Sciences, even the most rigid ones, no truth is born of the genius of an Archimedes or a Newton without a poetical emotion and some quivering of intelligent nature' [page 10]

Hillman speaks of various theories that have been put forward to explain how creative states come to be, and these turn out - in these theories - to be states in which 'inspiration and emotion blend'. As an example, Hillman cites Plato's description of the four types of mania or frenzy (prophetic, initiatory or Dionysian, poetic and erotic) in which 'spritual' and 'emotional' goals converge. [223] For Hillman, a craving for ecstasy and inspiration is a craving for 'another perspective on reality' [236]. And this is inextricably accompanied by the appearance of refined aesthetic and deep religious feeling - which, for Hillman, manifests the 'development and differentiation' of the feeling function. [94-5, Hillman and Von Franz ⁵ ].

Accordingly, it is said that the main purpose of the 'profound' or 'inspired' emotions is the transformation of the individual; they foster a shift from the old to the new [283]:

[One] achievement of emotion ... is IMPROVEMENT. This improvement can be taken as an energetic transformation of the physical into the psychological, as a creative transformation of the old into the new, and as a molar transformation of the part into the whole. ... To speak strictly: my state of being during emotion is an improvement over my state of being without emotion, regardless of what happens afterwards. How are we to understand this fundamental question of emotion as an improvement? Here we can recall that the main hypotheses put forward throughout this work, of which the notions of change and motion discussed above form aspects, conceive emotion as a RELATION. Be it between subject and object, man and world, two kinds of willing, ... emotion is the 'Zwischenfunktion' that relates. [283]

Emotion, as the psychological function [Feeling] that 'relates', plays an integral role in self-organization, which (from another perspective) can be seen as 'transformation' [iNtuition].

From yet another closely related point of view, emotion serves learning - it is not only 'a necessary element in knowing' [Thinking], but an element that characteristically involves the body [Sensing]:

... Beck makes out a case, based on his view of emotion as a molar event, for emotion as a necessary element in knowing. Zilborg presents the same view concerning the effectiveness of insight in psychotherapy. Prescott stresses the importance of emotion in education: 'Undoubtedly, emotions are the most potent and frequent factors in the change of attitudes'. And Weiner hints: ...'emotion may...control some essential stage in learning, and in other similar processes.' ... abovel all, emotion is a mediator between outer stimuli and inner drive mechanisms. The special function of emotion is to direct and control the more mechanical, instinctual and physiological aspects of behavior which emotion accompanies. Therefore, the more developed is the emotional faculty, the more are the drive aspects of behavior open to direction through emotion. Again the model is a continuum in which the upper end (here 'outer') can direct and determine the lower or inner. On the model of levels this view says that through emotion the innermost personality becomes accessible to cultural influences. Thus emotion serves learning. [220]

Knowing can, accordingly, be seen 'as an emotional experience' [220] with a kinesthetic component.

In learning we integrate diverse experiences, constructing a 'world'. In this project, '... affects tend toward integration...' and hence 'they are sought after, even when consciously experienced as unpleasurable'. [Landauer, 221]

Goldstein makes the further connection between personal integration and self-realization:

...the individual can and does bring himself into these emotional conditions because they make for better self-realization. ... even though experienced as disturbance, emotion may not really be a state of disorganization, but rather one of reorganization with special significance within the totality of behavior.

In sum, emotion furthers the development of personality and in a sense serves, and is an essential aspect of, the learning process. [221]

Self-realization is associated with the achievement of creative power, according to some theories. And emotion, as we've seen above, is often associated with creativity. And creativity is described as the capacity to bring together, in close juxtaposition, incommensurable ideas. It is not surprising, then, that emotion can be alternately viewed as:

• 'the matrix and source of all human achievement through which man frees energy ...' Yakovlev,
• a kind of energetic matrix (Yakovlev),
• ferment (Ribot), and
• tension (Mac Murray) [221-222]

Hillman comments:

... The essential point in all this is that emotion is the ground of creation; it makes creation possible. Just how emotion works in the creative process is a mysterious and stupendous issue, involving such questions as the nature of inspiration, prophecy, and the creative act. [222]

But in level-three theory the emphasis is not exclusively, or even primarily, on EMOTION - those peak experiences of the sort that Hillman points to in the above passage. The emphasis is, rather, on the role that FEELING plays in everyday life - as a type of ever-present pre-conceptual processing of information about the self in interaction with the environment [Greenburg and Safran, 147-8] ⁶. It is what imbues events with value and permits the individual to make rapid (unconscious) appraisals on which adaptive responses can be initiated [G&S, 148]. And it provides organismic feedback that permits us to adapt to environments [G&S, 160].

With the shift of emphasis that takes place at level three - from emotion, as the most important topic of interest, to feeling - there comes another shift: feeling itself begins to be understood primarily in terms of everpresent 'feeling states' (occuring in the background of consciousness) as opposed to discrete 'feelings' that are singled out, in the foreground of the individual's consciousness, as explicit objects of attention.

When feeling is, at level three, conceived as an everpresent background state it is only natural to think of it as exhibiting subtle changes in state#160;- changes which we refer to in everyday language as 'moods'. The concept of 'mood', as we shall see below, turns out to be the PRIMARY theoretical construct introduced in level three theories of emotion.

In order to understand how, precisely, feeling and emotion contribute to the self-organization of the individual's experience we must explore the relationship between moods, feeling, consciousness, attention, subsidiary awareness, and 'unconscious process' in the individual. This exploration has been undertaken by various level-three theorists, whose work we will consider in the next section.

Feeling, Consciousness, Attention, and Subsidiary Awareness

An exemplary level-three theory of emotion was originally put forward by Evans (1974) and later elaborated by Evans and Fudjack (1976) ⁷ in the course of presenting a model that construes consciousness as a complex phenomena in which feeling plays the key role. Many features of this sophisticated theory of emotion were later corroborated by others working independently [see Leventhal, 149 in Greenburg]. For the purpose of providing a simple and clear overview of the relationship between 'consciousness', 'attention', 'feeling', and 'subsidiary awareness', we will now make a brief presentation of the model presented by Evans and Fudjack.

According to the model, feeling is the MODE through which we experience the sophisticated self-organizational processes that we are not otherwise aware of in any explicit way in consciousness - processes that are often thereby mistakenly taken to be occuring totally OUTSIDE of the individual's awareness, in the 'unconscious' (i.e., in the body itself - at a purely 'physiological' level).

So it can be said that our feeling states occur IN consciousness, at the interface between lower level processes that are truly 'unconscious' and what is taking place in the explicit awareness of the individual.

The cardinal assumption underwriting the model presented by Evans and Fudjack is that there are, generally speaking, two types of awareness present in the individual's 'consciousness'- focal awareness and subsidiary awareness. In the focal awareness of the individual are objects of attention that he or she is explicitly aware of. But the individual is also simultaneously aware, albeit 'subsidiarily' (that is - non-explicitly) of things that are not at that moment in his or her focal awareness. These items are nevertheless 'in' consciousness, albeit 'implicitly' or 'tacitly', and can thus be said to be in the individual's 'subsidiary' awareness.

The distinction between the two types of awareness is likened by Evans and Fudjack to the gestalt distinction between figure and ground, and to the distinction between content and context. Indeed, it is postulated that what we are aware of focally, as the explicit object of our attention, IS the figure - which comprises the explicit 'content' of consciousness at any given moment. Likewise, what we are aware of 'subsidiarily' is the gestalt ground, the CONTEXT of our experience. It is the prevailing context, at any given moment, that we are aware of tacitly at that moment.

Furthermore, we experience our tacit (or subsidiary) awareness AS feeling. More precisely, we experience it as an everpresent 'underlying feeling state'. Fluctuations in the underlying feeling state are felt as 'moods'. We experience our subsidiary awareness of context, in other words, in the mode of feeling.

To put this yet another way - to speak about 'feeling states', is, in effect, to construe feeling as a 'whole'. The objects of our attention are, accordingly, the PARTS that have been singled out FROM the whole, and this is achieved by what is normally referred to as 'selective attention'. Evans and Fudjack described the complex interactions between consciousness and the environment in the following way:

Now that we have the concept of a feeling whole we can elaborate on it by saying that the whole itself is in a continuous process of modification. In psychological terms it is affective; that is, it is a felt reaction to the environment in which changes in the environment are continually producing modification of feeling tone. We are dealing with a system that we experience as a felt whole and the changes in feeling tone produced by the environment are experienced as changes in underlying feeling state. Moreover, our feelings influence which objects of attention are 'relevated' from the whole. Likewise, the appearance of new objects of attention in the environment bring about a change in underlying feeling-state. Singling out a particular part of the system as object of attention results in a different underlying feeling-state than would result from singling out some other part.

For we experience part of the whole explicitly and have a feeling for the remainder, so to speak, which will be different as different parts are singled out. ⁸

What individuals pick up on, via their capacity to 'feel', is the nature of the 'whole' (i.e., the general 'system') in which they are immersed: through feeling, they directly experience the whole 'surround' - the context. Shifts in the feeling state thus reflect overall changes of state in the system. And this begins to explain why it can be said that it is through 'feeling' in particular that we consciously participate in the self-organizing aspects of this system. It also begins to explain why it is appropriate to say that such self-organization is continually taking place - as underlying feeling states actively subsidize the relevation of particular objects of attention and the objects of attention that are thereby singled out in turn modify our underlying feeling states.

In this view, it is our subsidiary (non-explicit, or 'subconscious') awareness of context which FRAMES our experience, and is present for us as an over-all feeling state. Fluctuations in these states are experienced as 'moods'#160;- which, in turn, influence the 'unconscious' (or non-deliberative) choices that we make concerning which objects in our environment will next be relevated by selective attention. A sequence of deflections of attention#160;- from one object to the next#160;- occurs. And the objects that we as a result become explicitly aware of influence our moods. So there is a continual feed-forward and feed-back relationship between our feeling states (which reside in the background of consciousness) and the objects that are brought explicitly into focus, at the center of awareness.

Later theorists ⁹ described relationship between 'mood', 'frame', and 'attention' in similar terms. For example, Morris, discussing Isen's [1984] findings, states:

By now it should be apparent that Isen's explanation for the diffuse effect of mood is that it quite literally is a 'frame of mind'. It therefore affects whatever happens to be in focal attention or 'figural' at the moment. Moreover, because the feeling state arises as a result of automatic cognitive processes, we may not even be aware that we are in a mood. Thus, it can operate as a context, or, in my terms, a ground, subtly influencing our responses to events. (13) [For further analysis and critique of Morris's theory, in the context of the Evans-Fudjack model, see the section on Morris in "The Subject of Consciousness Revisited" (Fudjack, 2000).]

Like Evans and Fudjack, Morris also maintains that the figure-ground distinction (as it manifests in the organization of the perceptual field) is best understood as an ATTENTIONAL phenomena, and identifies the 'figure' with 'the part we attend to'. He also clearly recognizes that when mood, as frame of mind, occurs outside of focal attention it has an affect on what is subsequently attended to:

A central premise of this monograph is that the way in which mood affects us depends ultimately on the degree to which it is in or out of focal attention. When not in attention, mood has the characteristics of ground; it is the formless backdrop against which we experience events. Although our moods may often escape attention, the evidence reviewed in Chapter 5 suggests that they can nonetheless subtly insinuate themselves into our lives, influencing what we remember of the past, perceive in the present and expect from the future. Thus mood acts quite literally as the frame of mind.

Morris cites what he calls the 'the cocktail party phenomenon' as evidence that we are indeed aware of what happens outside of the focus of attention. While an individual can focus on what one participant is saying, other conversations, although experienced as background, nevertheless remain 'within earshot'. When one's name is mentioned in one of these background conversations attention is rapidly deployed and we 'tune in' on what is being said. Kreuger, as Evans and Fudjack pointed out, made a similar point - albeit much earlier. In his attempt to explain how this type of (subsidiary) awareness can influence mood, he said:

Who has not experienced that a 'mood' which dominated him totally arose or changed in a moment, even to its qualitative opposite, when something happened in the background, when something was out of place or was gone, something that, considered in itself alone, seemed to be extremely unimportant, even seemed to be without relation to the remaining content of experience? [77]

For Kreuger this is possible because 'feelings are the complex qualities of the experienced total-whole, of the experienced totality'. [93] He describes it this way: 'The total-whole of experience always has a specific, immediately observable quality which changes in a particular, continuous way' [69]. And 'the experience-qualities of this total-whole,' he says, 'are the feelings and emotions [page 35, in Evans and Fudjack].

The concepts of 'attitude' and 'attunement' are seen as intimately associated with the concept of 'mood' by level-three theorists. Bollnow's extensive treatment of moods (1941) utilizes the fact that the German word for mood is 'stimmung', meaning 'tuning'. According to Hillman, 'Bollnow uses this etymological fact to highlight the element of 'attunement' that underlies 'being in the mood for'. [page 47, The Education of the Feeling Function]. We are also told by Midgley that feelings are 'not just feelings... they are attitudes' [44].

All of these views are consistent with one another - together they make good sense, and their connection is predicted by the Evans-Fudjack model. For it is by virtue of our underlying feeling states (and their fluctuations, which manifest in 'moods') that we keep in touch with whatever 'situation' we are in at the moment, whatever situation we 'attune' ourselves to by holding it - as 'felt-context' - in the background of consciousness. Our feeling states can thus be said to constitute 'attitudes' and 'expectations' that FRAME our experience.

Conversely, cognized meaning is experienced as 'emotional tone'.

In Gendlin's model, complex meanings are not conceptualized outside of awareness and then defended against. Rather, these meanings are preconceptual, undifferentiated; that is, they are available to awareness, but are as yet not explicit. [They are] ... felt experiencing. (Greenberg and Safran, 48)

Complex meanings are, in other words, located by Gendlin in SUBSIDIARY (non-focal) awareness - where they are experienced as feeling. Consistent with this view is Wexler's, according to which feeling is generated 'in the process of organizing information'. [48] To put this a slightly different way - it is through the shifts that we feel in our underlying feeling states that we subjectively experience the 'organizing' that is taking place outside of explicit awareness.

Yet another example can be found in the work of the Gestalt therapists Perls, Hefferline and Goodman. They introduce the notion of an 'organism/environment field' - the patterning of which is experienced by the individual as emotion [50] - in much the same way that Evans and Fudjack appeal to the notion of a 'system' (as this term is understood in 'general systems theory') ¹⁰:

Emotions are not volcanic discharge processes, but ... the organism's direct evaluative and immediate experience of the organism/environment field...(50)

It is this view which permits Perls et. al. to 'take a holistic perspective on human functioning... [seeing] emotions as integrative responses by means of which people are connected to their environment', according to Hillman. (61)

The role of the 'unconscious' in feelings (it is often asked 'can emotions be unconscious' for instance) is best approached via the concept of 'subsidiary awareness' as opposed to the concept of 'the unconscious', which is infected with a mistaken view regarding what it is to be conscious. [This will be addressed in appendix f: the unconscious and feeling.] All we need say about that at this point is that feeling is the one mental phenomenon that we can experience both as 1) directly IN consciousness (albeit in SUBSIDIARY awareness), and yet 2) OUTSIDE of explicit awareness. Feelings abide in the liminal space that is located outside of focal awareness, at the periphery of consciousness. Insofar as this realm is sometimes (mistakenly) conceived as an UNconscious area, feelings may be described as existing 'in the unconscious'. It is equally true, however, to say that there are no feelings outside of consciousness!

It is the unique prerogative of feeling, in other words, to exist precisely at the interface between focal awareness and the physiological processes that are truly outside of consciousness (and hence literally 'unconscious'). Morris makes a similar point when he discusses the status of 'moods' in consciousness. He starts by maintaining, like Evans and Fudjack, that although we can say that 'feelings' sometimes exist as objects of attention (and that we are thus explicitly aware of them at that time), more often they are 'in' the background, or 'form' the background. For Morris this presents a theoretical problem, which we do not need to get into here. Suffice it to say that the only way to resolve Morris's problem is by adopting the terminology suggested by Evans and Fudjack - which proposes that a clear distinction can and must be made between subsidiary and focal awareness (with the term 'attention' reserved for the latter), and that the former be understood as taking place 'within' conscious experience - albeit 'as' feeling.

Gendlin and Rogers also emphasize the IMPLICIT nature of the 'meaning' that is characteristically associated with feelings held in subsidiary awareness. [67] Another way to put this is that the information processed in subsidiary awareness provides a backdrop of meaning against which decisions regarding selective attention are (unconsciously) made.

According to Greenberg and Safran [128], there is now substantial evidence demonstrating that information processing takes place outside of focal awareness, that the processing taking place outside of focal awareness can create 'attentional affects', and that these can direct attention to selected objects or events in the environment and repress awareness of other objects and events. Such processing thereby serves to regulate the entry of information into focal awareness.

Contemporary models of selective attention have attempted to account for this process in a variety of ways. Broadbent's (1958) original 'filter theory' of selective attention provided for a rudimentary perceptual processing of sensory information outside of awareness. ... Neisser (1967) maintains that all conscious awareness is preceded by a preliminary preattentive process that organizes the perceptual field... thus separating stimuli into figure and ground. This preattentive processing is global and holistic in nature, in contrast to focal attentional processing, which is logical and sequential in nature. It is entirely possible within this system for information that has been processed preattentively never to become represented in focal awareness. [129]

Appraisal processes occuring outside of focal awareness can account for what is sometimes called 'subception' - in which perception that is 'below the threshold for consciously mediated verbal reporting' occurs. [131]

One of the most interesting yet least researched effects of an unconsciously preceived stimulus is its impact on affect or feeling tone. Despite the fact that critical information may, for one reason or another, be prevented from entering explicit awareness, its existence at a socalled 'preconscious' level [i.e. - in subsidiary awareness] will nevertheless be signaled by a change in feeling tone.

In other words, what is perceived outside of focal awareness creates a change in the underlying feeling state of the individual. Findings by Byrne, Smith et. al., Goldstein and Barthol, and Zuckerman demonstrated that information presented subliminally influences affect. And Dixon (1981) has in fact suggested that subliminal perception and selective attention are demonstrations of a SIMILAR information-processing phenomenon. [134]

This would not be suprising to anyone who views attention and subsidiary awareness as two TYPES of awareness simultaneously operating in consciousness, as do Evans and Fudjack. Subsidiary awareness, then, is easily conceived as capable of acting as the 'avante guarde' form of awareness - by virtue of which we FEEL our way toward objects that will, as a result, be brought into focus, and away from those which will thereby be supressed and thus never reach explicit awareness.

This kind of process is what makes possible 'tacit' knowledge of the sort that plays such a big part in scientific discovery according to philosopher of science Michael Polanyi. The following passage, from work more recent than Polanyi's, describes a psychological experiment that sheds light on the nature of 'tacit knowledge' and its relationship with 'feeling':

In this study they created an artificial language by specifying in advance a finite set of allowable transitions between letters. On the basis of this 'grammar', 15 acceptable letter strings were generated to be employed as training stimuli, and 28 additional letter strings were generated to be employed for an anagram task.

Subjects memorized the stimulus materials and were later able to identify NEW strings of syllables as 'well-formed' (conforming to the 'grammar') without knowing HOW they were performing this task.

Often subjects who had demonstrated high levels of accuracy would verbalize incorrect rules or indicate that they had chosen an answer because it 'felt' right. [136]

One could conjecture that in other situations it might be NEGATIVE feelings ('it feels wrong') that would alert subjects to the presence of 'anomalous' facts, ones that are not consistent with the currently-held situation-specific assumptions and expectations of the subject. And, in fact, this is what appears to have taken place in the classic experiment described by Thomas Kuhn in Scientific Revolutions. In that study subjects were tachistoscopically presented with a series of images of playing cards, including a few 'anomalous' ones - a red ten of spades, for example. Subjects typically had difficulty identifying the anomalous cards but did not know that this was because the cards were anomalous. They simply reported FEELING that something was wrong. When the anomalous cards were presented for long enough periods of time, however, the feeling states of subjects usually guided them eventually to explicit knowledge of what was wrong. In an informal replication of this study, we noticed that right before arriving at insight some subjects made curious verbal statements ('These bloody spades always stop me dead in my tracks'!) that indicated that they may have 'unconsciously' recognized the problem (that the spades were colored red) BEFORE they explicitly recognized that fact, or could articulate it in a more direct and precise fashion.

In a similar study, cited by R.D. Laing, subjects who were asked to read a letter that displayed a strong 'double binding' message experienced intense feelings of distress before they could bring the source of such feelings (the contradictory injuctions tacitly presented by the double bind) into relief in focal awareness.

How might we account for the apparently sophisticated decisions made outside of the scope of focal awareness? Or, putting the question a slightly different way, as Greenberg and Safran do: 'What is the nature of the process through which subsidiary component information is integrated and synthesized into emotional experience?' [G&S, 162] One possible answer involves appealing to 'schematic processing' [62]. Leventhal's (1984) concept of 'emotional schemata', for example, is a theoretical construct that creates a conceptual bridge that ties the affective aspect of everyday conscious experience (i.e., our 'feeling states') more closely to its information-processing aspects (i.e., 'experienced-context').

Emotional schemata, as Leventhal understands them, have a number of important functions:

1. They permit the individual to conduct rapid perceptual-emotional appraisal of his or her environment, on the basis of which adaptive responses can be initiated... Because emotional schemata function at an automatic level, they do not require the allocation of attentional capacity to operate, and can thus be involved in automatic appraisal activity even if the individual is preoccupied with some other activity.

2. Emotional schemata act as filters that focus attention on important aspects of the environment. They thus provide an automatic adaptive, orienting function.

3. Emotional schemata play a critical role in the development and elaboration of particular memory systems or knowledge domains. Because emotional reactions can direct the individual's attention to particular aspects of the environment for sustained periods of time, they facilitate the processing of information that is associated with the object or event of focus. For example, an individual who has positive feelings about a particular topic may learn all he can about the topic.

4. Emotional schemata are involved in the generalization of emotional experiences along specific dimension...

5. ...emotional schemata are critical to the development of new emotions...

6. Emotional schemata organize experience by integrating particulars of the individual's interactions with the world (eg, situational perceptions, expressive motor behaviors, autonomic responses) into an organized whole that has an emotional meaning for the individual. ...

7. Finally, emotional schemata are important in the process of establishing stable object relationships. ...[they] insure that the individual interacts with his or her world in a somewhat consistent fashion. [152]

Conclusion

skip to footnotes and references

Other theorists have known the feeling-based 'schematic' arrangement of experience that is discussed in the above passage by other names - 'relevancy system', 'context', 'frame', and 'field', to mention a few. In this paper we have seen some of what can be said on the subject of how these entities, whatever one might choose to call them, relate to what is normally referred to as feeling and emotion. It is worth adding, by way of a conclusion to this section, that if - according to level-three theories of emotion - feeling is best conceived not as an 'object' but as a 'field', the nature of that field may most aptly be described as essentially 'intersubjective' according to level-four theories - as we shall see in the next section of this work.