I've now read several times through a daunting review article by Feldman et al. in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science titled "The Neurobiology of Interoception and Affect." (motivated readers can obtain a copy of the whole article from me). The bottom line is that the subjective feelings of what is going on inside our bodies - that taken together form our sense of well being - rise from a an array of cortical and visceral neuroendocrine systems that are much more complex that the nerve pathways regulating our exteroception, the sensing of external signals such as sound, light, or touch. I would recommend reading the article to get a sense of the array of players that include upper and lower cortical regions, spinal cord, the autonomic nervous system, the enteric nervous system, etc.
We can describe our feelings, our affect, along two fundamental axes, valence and arousal. Valence refers to whether something is pleasant or unpleasant, desirable or dangerous - do we go for it or scram? Arousal refers to where are we on the spectrum of being calm to being excited or distressed. A third fundamental axis is formed by our experience of agency, how powerful versus helpless we feel in a given situation.
In this post I want to pass on a rich graphic from the article showing how we can categorize our feelings in language with respect to these fundamental axes. It is based on Saif M. Mohammad's computational linguistics studies that have obtained reliable human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for 20,000 English words. The graphic gives us a description of central regulators of our well being to which we have subjective (interoceptive) access. (You should be able to click on this and the following images to enlarge them.) I have found that referencing my own subjective feelings to these axes has helped me to be more aware of them and assisted in their regulation.
If the above looks complicated, it gets even worse. There really should be a 3-dimensional rather than 2-dimensional plot (see graphic below). The further axis of regulation used by Mohammad in generating data for the above figure is our subjective experience of dominance or agency in a given situation (where are we on a gradient of helpless to powerful?) Here is a clip from the Saif M. Mohammad reference link shown above with some definitions:
As a footnote or addendum, I will also repeat here a more simple graphic showing these axes that I have used in my lectures, taken from the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, (enter 'Barrett' in the search box in left column of this page to find MindBlog posts describing her studies on understanding what feelings and emotions are).
