International Journal of Nursing Knowledge

This article explores the concept of feeling, its historical foundations, and the use of this construct by other disciplines, e.g., philosophy and psychology. Feelings are well known and accepted as integral to human sensations and emotional experiences. One of the basic assumptions within nursing science is the notion that clients and nurses are emotional beings continually responding to the environment in a dynamic mind-body-spirit interaction. Phenomena classified within the taxonomic category of Feeling relate to a human response pattern involving the subjective awareness of information (NANDA. 1989). However, feeling as a human response has remained an underdeveloped and unrefined concept within nursing science. An operational definition is proposed in an effort to facilitate the classification of nursing diagnoses in regard to the holistic nature of persons.