According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, a feeling is "a self-contained phenomenal experience"; feelings are "subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them". The term feeling is closely related to, but not the same as, emotion. Feeling may, for instance, refer to the conscious subjective experience of emotions. The study of subjective experiences is called phenomenology. Psychotherapy generally involves a therapist helping a client understand, articulate, and learn to effectively regulate the client's own feelings, and ultimately to take responsibility for the client's experience of the world. Feelings are sometimes held to be characteristic of embodied consciousness.

The English noun feelings may generally refer to any degree of subjectivity in perception or sensation. However, feelings often refer to an individual sense of well-being (perhaps of wholeness, safety, or being loved). Feelings have a semantic field extending from the individual and spiritual to the social and political. The word feeling may refer to any of a number of psychological characteristics of experience, or even to reflect the entire inner life of the individual (see mood). As self-contained phenomenal experiences, evoked by sensations and perceptions, feelings can strongly influence the character of a person's subjective reality. Feelings can sometimes harbor bias or otherwise distort veridical perception, in particular through projection, wishful thinking, among many other such effects.

Feeling may also describe the senses, such as the physical sensation of touch.

In psychology and philosophy, feeling is commonly defined as the subjective experience of emotion or sensation. Although the terms feeling, emotion, affect, and mood are sometimes used interchangeably in everyday language, they have distinct meanings in academic contexts.

According to psychologist Carroll Izard, feelings are best understood as the conscious experience of emotion, arising when an affective state reaches awareness. William James similarly proposed that feelings result from the perception of bodily changes in response to external stimuli, thus forming part of the emotional process. More recently, affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp hypothesized the role of subcortical brain systems in generating core affects that underlie both feelings and emotions.

Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that affect is most likely innate in mammals (and possibly all vertebrates), whereas emotions are constructed mental representations that emerge from the brain's interpretation of interoceptive prediction signals combined with past experience (organized as concepts) and signals from the outside world. In philosophical psychology, particularly in the work of Carl Jung, feeling is considered one of the four primary functions of consciousness, alongside thinking, sensation, and intuition. Unlike emotions, which are often reactive, Jung defined feeling as a rational function that evaluates and assigns value.

Feeling also differs from sensation: while sensation refers to raw sensory input (such as touch, heat, or pain), feelings involve evaluative or affective judgements about those sensations or experiences. Similarly, moods are typically more diffuse and long-lasting affective states, while feelings tend to be more transient and directly tied to particular events or thoughts. These distinctions are foundational in fields such as affective science, philosophy of mind, and cognitive psychology, where the term feeling plays a central role in understanding consciousness, subjectivity, and emotional life.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio distinguishes between emotions and feelings: Emotions are mental images (i.e. representing either internal or external states of reality) and the bodily changes accompanying them, whereas feelings are the perception of bodily changes. In other words, emotions contain a subjective element and a third-person observable element, whereas feelings are subjective and private.