Emotional contagion
People automatically mimic others' expressions and posture, which can produce matching feelings within seconds.
Never tested separately
Clairsentience
Clairsentience is the claimed ability of receiving information as a physical sensation rather than an image. It has never been tested as a distinct ability.
What people describe
Clairsentience, or "clear feeling", is described as sensing information through physical sensations and emotions: a heaviness entering a room, chills near a certain place, or suddenly feeling someone else's pain or mood. People who identify with it often describe being overwhelmed in crowds.
How it entered the record
The word belongs to the "clair" family used in spiritualist and New Age writing, alongside clairvoyance and clairaudience, and it became common in popular psychic literature in the late twentieth century. Unlike clairvoyance and telepathy, it has not been isolated as a separate subject of controlled experiments.
The experiment
None isolating it
How it was run
No protocol has ever separated it from clairvoyance: both are scored by whether the answer is right, not by how it arrived.
Sample
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Result
Untested as a distinct ability. Every claimed demonstration is a clairvoyance trial with a different description of the experience.
The "clair" terms multiply by sensory channel — sight, hearing, feeling, knowing — but the experiments only ever measure the answer. The distinction lives entirely in the report, not in the result.
Claim
Receiving information as a physical sensation rather than an image
Word from
French clair "clear" + Latin sentire "to feel"
Status
Never tested separately
Where the word comes from
A twentieth-century addition to the "clair" family, built by analogy with clairvoyance rather than from any separate tradition.
What psychology offers instead
Interoception
The body registers tension, temperature and smell before they reach awareness, and the result arrives as a "feeling".
Expectation
Knowing a place has a history — a hospital, a battlefield — primes the body to react.
How to test it fairly yourself
Visit places or handle objects chosen by someone else, without being told their history, and record your impressions before you learn it. Compare against a friend with no claimed ability doing the same.