Feelings are our reflections of the world.
Our life and our understanding of it makes us feel things.
Say you own a dog, and you love your dog. You have brought it up nicely and it does all the things a pet should do. It may fetch the ball for you, it may play with you, although it has sharp teeth but never bites you, obeys you et al. Suppose one day, you watch a rabid dog bite some one. Now, once you go back to your dog, you will not feel as safe as the day before near your dog. You will invariably feel instigated by the dog. A train of thought will build in your mind which will push you to believe that your pet might harm you.
It is simple to understand that feelings are just reflections. You can only feel what you have experienced first hand. You can’t feel something which you have not tried. For eg: Many cricketers are proficient in cricket but often falter at the top stage. This happens because the feel of showing up before a lot of people plays with their minds and they can’t take the pressure which builds up.
Gut Feeling is a primitive feeling. It is the Virender Sehwag of cricket. See the ball, hit the ball. It is something which is not dependent on what you have experienced. You see a girl and you like her, you don’t make your judgments about her or think of the times you were rejected by others. A thought like that doesn’t even cross your mind. You watch a close cricket match and kind of know that the team you support will win.
When you make such a decision there is little logic in it, it is reflexes and reflexes alone. Involuntary reflexes of mind. It can trigger from anything, maybe you saw a person’s face in the crowd fervently supporting a team, and that pushed you to believe that your team will win. Gut feeling is like Blink. You don’t think much and you take a decision/make an opinion.
It is not subjective, it is objective all the time. This helps when you have very little time to process or avail the necessary details about something.
All the other feelings are circumstantial. They are dependent on the things you have seen, watched, felt, heard et al. There is logic in it which is based on things which are in the memory.