Cognitive Feelings from Healthy Experience to Psychopathology: An Integrative Review Across Phenomenology, Psychology, Neuroscience, and Computation

Abstract

Cognitive feelings, such as the feeling of knowing, familiarity, presence, reality, confidence, agency, and body ownership, are subjective experiences arising from cognitive processes, playing crucial roles in perception, memory, and decision-making. Despite extensive research across philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, they have been studied in fragmented ways, lacking a unified theoretical framework. This review integrates multiple perspectives on cognitive feelings. First, we catalog fifteen cognitive feelings organized in thirteen subsections, examining their normal functions and clinical manifestations when disrupted. Second, drawing on the phenomenological tradition from William James through Husserl and Heidegger to Ratcliffe, we distinguish three modes of cognitive feelings: feelings of thought (metacognitive monitoring), feelings of perception (constitution of worldly appearances), and feelings of being (existential self–world relations). Third, from the perspective of affective psychology, we demonstrate that cognitive feelings share neural substrates with emotions, particularly the anterior insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, and are bidirectionally modulated by mood states. Fourth, from a neurological perspective, we extend Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis to cognitive feelings as metacognitive somatic markers, whose selective disruption through right-hemisphere damage produces characteristic monothematic delusions, suggesting hemispheric asymmetries. Fifth, we present a computational framework based on predictive processing theory, explaining cognitive feelings through prediction errors, precision weighting, and free energy minimization. Across these perspectives, we examine impairments in psychiatric and neurological disorders, including depersonalization, schizophrenia, Capgras syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and depression, bridging theory with clinical observation.