There's the William James (I think) idea that the amygdala creates physical changes in your body in response to stimulus. THEN, your conscious mind perceives those changes and the corresponding stimulus and sort of infers, "Oh I must be feeling x. " But it hits the body first which makes sense when you look at emotions from an adaptive perspective as motivators that helped us survive by initiating action.

I heard about a study on an NPR show called Radiolab which confirmed that people with spinal cord injuries experienced their emotions as being less powerful since becoming paraplegic or quadraplegic. The deadening of emotion increasing as the injury went further up the spine. This seems to confirm the importance of the bodily sensations in our identification and experience of emotion. If, as a quadraplegic, you can only feel your pulse pounding in your head, fear just does not have the same heft as it did when your whole body throbbed with your heartbeat.

Just something to think about--that those emotions may well be present in the body and we are yet unaware or perhaps even in denial. This is one of the things mindfulness can improve I'd imagine--our ability to notice our sensations.