How are you feeling? Increasingly complex answers to a simple question.
Two current views of emotion
- Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp)
- Jaak Panksepp’s primary- process affective systems (Panksepp & Biven, 2012)
- Dr. Panksepp work was based on the extensive observation and research literature on humans and other animals (including much of his own), from which he concludes there were indication of a number of basic neurological processing systems at a subcortical level. He concluded that these had evolved to support adaptation and survival and strongly influenced individual differences in personality and behavior.
- “Primal affects are surely prelinguistic experiences–experiences common to all mammals and perhaps to other animals as well.” (Pankseptt & Biven, 2012, p. 79)
- “Because affects evolved many millions of years before the appearance of spoken language, they are difficult to verbally describe, they they are every bit as real as our earth’s gravity . . .” (Davis & Panksepp, 2018, p. 54
- Panksepp established his conceptualization based on 1) electrical stimulation of the mammalian brain, 2) pharmacological challenges, and 3) brain lesion studies.
- In 1982, Panksepp was convinced that there were at least four biological brain-based emotional action systems, which he labeled: Expectancy, Rage, Fear, and Panic. By the 1990s he expanded his list to seven, “well documented primary-process emotional command systems (SEEKING/Expectancy, RAGE/Anger, FEAR/Anxiety, LUST, CARE/Nurturing, Panic/Sadness, and Play/Social Joy) and introduced the use of capitalization to distinguish these primary emotional brain system from the use of his chosen emotional labels in common language.” (Davis & Montag, 2019, p. 2).
- He viewed these as directly relevant to mammalian personality and psychopathology.
- Panksepp concluded there was insufficient evidence to include Social Dominance as a primary emotion, and considered it to be an acquired behavior.
- Panksepp also recognized homeostatic affects, HUNGER and THIRST, but did not consider these in the same category as emotional affects.
- Panksepp tell us that, “primary-process (i.e., basic or primordial) emotional networks are defined in terms of neural and behavioral criteria.”, “Basic emotional networks can be defined by six criteria:
- They generate characteristic behavioral-instinctual action patterns
- They are initially activated by a limited set of unconditional stimuli
- The resulting arousals outlast precipitating circumstances
- Emotional arousals gate/regulate various sensory inputs into the brain
- They control learning and help program higher brain cognitive activities
- With maturation, higher brain mechanisms come to regulate emotional arousals.” (Panksepp, 2010, p. 534).
- Panksepp conceptualized brain organization as, “nested brain-mind hierarchies” He postulates three levels of emotional organization:
- Primary-process emotional feelings within mammalian brains
- Deeply subcortical
- From bottom-up: learning and development
- From top-down: learned responses
- Secondary emotional processes that arise from emotional learning (classical and operant conditioning)
- Largely upper limbic
- From Bottom-up: influences on ruminations and thoughts
From Top-down influences: cognitive regulation
- Tertiary-process emotions, “are the intrapsychic ruminations and thoughts about one’s about one’s lot in life. Such higher order affective-cognitions that promote ’intentions-to-act’ and are elaborated by medial-frontal regions.” (Panksepp, 2010, p. 534).
- Largely neocortical
- Primary-process emotional feelings within mammalian brains
- Panksepp’s seven primary process emotional systems:
- SEEKING (Expectancy) or (desire)
- appetitive vs consummatory behavior
approach motivation system, dopamine-driven - “the traditionally labeled ‘brain reward system’, discovered over 60 years ago. Most contemporary investigators agree that this system does not mediate feelings of sensory-type pleasures, but, instead, something very different; we think a proper affective descriptor for this evoked state is exuberance, for that is the state that accompanies enthusiastic foraging/exploration in humans, and those are the explicit behaviors evoked by DBS of the medial forebrain bundle (MFB), the neural substrate for SEEKING” (Panksepp & Yovell, 2014, p. 3).
- “this system mediates affective feelings organisms have when they energetically engage their environments in the search for all kinds of resources” . . . the old ‘brain reward’ nomenclature is still most commonly used, although new concepts have been emerging . . . of primary (SEEKING), secondary learning (‘wanting’), and tertiary-cognitive (‘reward predication error’) levels of neuronal processing.”
- pathologies of Seeking:
- addiction
- depression
- appetitive vs consummatory behavior
- FEAR (anxiety)
- The evolved FEAR circuit helps to unconditionally protect animals from pain and destruction. FEAR-ESB leads animals to flee, whereas much weaker stimulation elicits a freezing response.” (Panksepp, 2010, p. 538).
- RAGE (anger)
- “When SEEKING is thwarted, RAGE is aroused. Anger is provoked by curtailing animals’ freedom of action.” (Panksepp, 2010, p. 538).
- “distinguish RAGE from predatory aggression and from infanticide, which both appear to be manifestation of the SEEKING system.” (Panksepp & Biven, 2012, p. 172)
- LUST (sexual excitement) (sexual system)
- “mediated by specific brain circuits and chemistries, distinct for males and females, is aroused by male and female sex hormones, which control many brain chemistries including two ‘social neuropeptides’—oxytocin transmission is promoted by estrogen in females and vasopressin transmission by testosterone in males. These brain chemistries help create gender-specific sexual tendencies. Oxytocin promotes sexual readiness in females, as well as trust and confidence, and vasopressin promotes assertiveness, and perhaps jealous behaviors, in males.” (Panksepp, 2010, p. 538).
- “Lust is probably one of the most sensorially and homeostatically well-connected of the emotional systems, more so than RAGE and FEAR.” (Panksepp & Biven, 2012, p. 265), continues to discuss how, “nature does not respect our man-made categories. Still, categories allow us to see paterns and relationships in complex sets of data that are worthy of our attention.” (p. 265).
- CARE (nurturance)
- Maternal/caretaker nurturance system
In females hormonal shifts at the end of pregnancy (declining progestogen and increasing estrogen, prolactin, and oxytocin) increase maternal urges before the young are born and may help ensure strong maternal bonds are formed with offspring. - Robert Sapolsky notes that in primates (and some other species) caretaking can be predicted on basis of relative size of males and females
- larger males, prominent secondary sexual characteristics: “tournament” relationship, little role in child care, one male sexually active in the group
- more equal size, more “feminization” of male features: “pair bond” relationships, greater parental role for males, more monogamous relationships
- human are somewhat intermediate among primates
- Buss (2019) from the perspective of evolutionary psychology sees children as “vehicles” for parents’ genes, and considers qeustions such as why, in almost all cultures, women provide more parental care than fathers. He reviews to hypotheses:
- Paternity Uncertainty hypothesis: all mammal females “know” that their offspring carry 50% of the genes, males never have this certainty [“know” here is not being used in the sense of cognitive awareness, selective pressures will operate without any conscious knowledge]
- Mating Opportunity hypothesis: higher mating opportunity costs of parental care for males
- He reviews evidence that males are sensitive to evidence of genetic relatedness in the offspring of their mates and this is reflected in parental investment
- He reviews evidence that females have higher investment in offspring
- women are better than men at recognizing facial expression of emtion and have faster reaction times to both positive and negative emtional expressions
- argues for two typotheses: Attachment Promotion hypothesis and Fitness Threat hypothesis
- “tend-and-befriend” adaptations: tend: protect children from dangerous threats, befriend: create and maintain social networks that offer group protection
- “Women appear to have evolved decision rules to allocate more time to parenting and have evolved mechanisms of interest and emotional mind reading that render parenting more effective.” (p. 210)
- Buss (2019) also see conflict built into family relationships because the evolutionary pressures create competition between parents and children, siblings, and parents.
- Maternal/caretaker nurturance system
- PANIC/GRIEF (sadness)
- Separation distress system
- separation distress
- PLAY (social joy)
- Rough-and-tumble, physical social-engagement system
May promote higher social brain functions, including empathy - “This is a general principle: Play only occurs when one is safe, secure and feeling good. PLAY, however, is also a robust system: If young animals are healthy and feeling good, they almost invariably play together when given the chance.” (Panksepp & Biven, 2012, p. 355).
- Rough-and-tumble, physical social-engagement system
- In Panksepp’s view all mammals are sentient beings (they feel something being alive and dealing with the challenges of their environment). He believed there was clear evidence that animals other than humans had emotions and believed this had ethical and moral implications for research and treatment of animals.
- The word “emotion” derives from the Latin verb, “emovere”, which means, “to move out.” This is what he observed in nature and he hypothesized that in the evolution of early life emotions and their accompanying affects served to move animals into action in ways that served their survival. Emotion is the “ancestral voice” that guide all mammals.
- Each of the primary emotional affects is evaluative, they have a valence that is either pleasant and signals objects or situations to approach (SEEKING, LUST, CARE, PLAY) or aversive and signal objects or situations to avoid (RAGE, FEAR, PANIC).
- The “raw” primary affects are experienced as pleasant or aversive qualia, and can alter behavior and lead to secondary level learning (conditioning). “The emotional minds of most mammals may be limited to displaying ‘intention-in-action’ rather than a more reflective ‘intentions to act.’ In Endel Tulving’s terminology the capacity of most mammals likely combine anoetic (without knowing) and noetic (knowing) consciousness without necessarily attaining autonoetic consciousness—being able to sufficiently hold experiences in memory to review the past and anticipate the future (Tulving, 1985).” (Davis & Montag, 2019, p. 2).
- “animals allowed to make free ‘choices’ eagerly tun on DBS [deep brain stimulation], within what we call the SEEKING, LUST, CARE, and PLAY systems, they turn off DBS that evokes RAGE, FEAR, and PANCI (namely social distress) types of behavioral responses.” (Panksepp & Yovell, 2014, p. 2).
- Primordial emotions are innate (require no learning) but are not fixed and will change as a function of learning and memory. Fear conditioning and other learning process elaborate our emotional experience through association (respondent conditioning, operant and observational learning).
- Primary-process emotions survive decortication: both animal studies and human clinical cases can demonstrate these process in organisms without cerebral cortex.
- Panksepp viewed the neocortex as essentially a blank slate at birth and is “programmed” through experience: “the neocortex is fundamentally tabula rasa at birth” (Panksepp and Biven, 2012, p. 427). He believed even the primary sensory cortex areas were developed through interactions with subcortical regions and sensory experiences. Subcortical activity guides the organization of cortical systems.
- Panksepp considered how his primary emotional systems would relate to the Big Five of Personality (based on analysis of correlation patterns): [note the OCEAN arrangement]
- high SEEKING was associated with Openness to Experience
- there were no strong associations with Conscientiousness
- high PLAY was associated with Extraversion
- high CARE and low ANGER was associated with Agreeableness
- high FEAR, high SADNESS, and high ANGER were associated with Neuroticism (Montag & Panksepp, 2017, p. 8)
- SEEKING (Expectancy) or (desire)
Theory of constructed emotions
- Dr. Feldman-Barrett argues against “essentialism”: reification of an abstraction or statistical summary (average American family has 2.5 children, know any families with half a child?), the wonderful and troublesome capacity of our mind to categorize and treat as real generalizations. She believes that the “classical view of emotions” (and the view portrayed in the Disney movie Inside Out) is a myth.
- Her major conclusions:
- emotions are not hard-wired and not universal
you are not born with emotion circuits
no one has emotional circuits in their brain
emotions are guesses that your brain constructs on the fly, in the moment
emotions are not built in at birth, they are just built - Your brain weighs possibilities: Not: What is this? but: What is this most like (in my experience)?
Experiential ambivalence vs prediction - Predictions are primal, they help us make sense of the world in a rapid way
- Simulation, running an internal model of the world, memory
Your brain predicts a construction of the world based on past experience - running this Internal model accounts for 80% of your brain’s motabolic budget
- emotions are not hard-wired and not universal
- Brain is not reactive, it is predictive
- Agranular tissue (limbic) produces prediction and receive prediction errors from cortical areas; two limbic systems produce the predictions models: default mode network, salience mode network and the places where they overlap (core hubs) contain all limbic tissue, and contain primary interoception network.
- Networks are hard wired.
- Default Mode Network has been implicated in: social fear, physical fear, atypical emotions, emotion, emotion concepts, subjective value, social affiliation, chronic pain, trait judgments, empathy, moral judgements, theory of minds, reward, smoking addiction, memory prospection, perception, concepts
- Salience Network has been implicated in: atypical emotions, affect, effortful recall, executive attention, atrophy stress, atrophy mental disorders, interoception, recognition memory, bilingualism, multimodal integration, nociceptive pain, alcohol craving, empathy, decision making, errors, word form, propranolol during aversion
- Each network is multiprocess or domain general, involved in multiple activities
- Predictive coding approach
- “The core task of all brains . . . is to regulate the organism’s internal milieu . . . by anticipating needs and preparing to satisfy them before they arise.” (Sterling & Laugnin, 2015)
- Sensory information is noisy, ambiguous, sometimes incomplete
- Can have many different causes
- Brain needs to make a reverse inference, based on:
- past experiences
- internal experiences
- Emotions you seem to experience in other people come partially from your own head
- Physical movements have not intrinsic emotional meaning
- The way you experience your own emotions is basically the same way you experience other people’s emotions
- Your brain does come prewired to have some simple feelings
- Comfort
- Agitation
- Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings, based on interoception
- Simple summaries of what’s going on in your body
- Very little details
- Core affect: “At its core, a mental representation of emotion is a contentful state of pleasure or displeasure, . . . termed ‘core affect.’” (Feldman Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007, p. 5)
“information about the external world is translated into an internal affective code or state that indicates whether an object or situation is helpful or harmful, rewarding or threatening, requiring approach or withdrawal. With awareness, core affect is experienced as feelings of pleasure or displeasure that re to some extent arousing or quieting. Core affect may be constituted by a constantly changing stream of transient alterations in an organism’s neurophysiological sate that represents its immediate relationship to the flow of changing events.” ( Barrett, et al.. pp. 5-6)- Perception links these simple feeling with what’s going on around you to make predictions
- [context makes all the difference]
- Churning stomach in bakery, preparing to eat and digest
- Churning stomach in hospital, dread
- Your emotions are made by you
- These same networks are involved in cognition and in behavior
- These same networks are involved in the regulation of attention through connections with areas producing the neuromodulators
- Norepinephrine (Locus Coeruleus)
- Serotonin (Upper Raphe Nuclei)
- Dopamine (Substantia Nigra and VTA)
- Two activities are very expensive for your brain: movement and learning. Your brain is frugal, it only expends energy for activity that serves future allostasis
- Default mode network efficiently drives brain into different states with little energy input (predictions)
- Salience mode network drives brain into state that require more energy input (prediction errors: which to encode)
- Core Hubs (overlap) facilitates neural integration across network communities, create a stable representation
- Meaning making: concepts are a group of representations that are similar in some way, your brain is generation a concept. Not what are these but what are these like? A concept is brain’s best guess as a hypothesis about what is about to cause sensory changes in the world, a Bayesian filter for incoming sensory info. Once prediction is sufficiently confirmed become a categorization.
- We should consider metabolism and energy regulation when we consider any psychological phenomenon
- You have more control over your emotions than you think you do, not by snapping your fingers but by changing how you think about things
- Being the architect of your experience
- Uses test anxiety as example
- A hammering heartbeat is not necessary sign of anxiety
Could be preparing for battle to Ace that test - Emotional intelligence in action: Increased words for emotions gives greater differentiated perception of emotions:
- Emotional granularity
- You can cultivate this: [cognitive reframing]
- You can turn down the dial on emotional suffering, with practice you can get good at it
- More control also means more responsibility: Who’s responsible when you behave badly: you are. The actions you take today become the basis your brain uses to make decisions tomorrow
- Not because your culpable but because, sometimes we are responsible for something not because we are to blame but because we are the only ones who can change it
- Being the architect of your experience
Who’s right?
- I highly recommend the work of both these researchers and suggest you read and/or listen (both have TED talks and other U-Tube clips) to both Panksepp and Feldman-Barrett.
- I actually believe they are both correct and am quite confident that neither would agree with this statement.
- It is a matter of emphasis, in some areas they wind up reaching very similar conclusions (often expressed in very different language)
- Note that Panksepp clearly acknowledges the role of cortical processes to down-regulate emotional experience and he would not be surprised by the failure to “biological fingerprints” for our felt emotions—the “primary-process” affective systems he sees evidence for are, within his own system, two levels removed for anything we actually experience except as very young children or in extreme crisis.
- Feldman-Barrett acknowledges that we come prewired to have some “simple feelings” and “core affect.”
- I like Barrett’s emphasis on process, I think her brain-in-a-box metaphor is flawed.
- I like Panksepp’s “long view” of mammalian neurological processing in the service of survival and adaptation and his “wide view” in considering other mammals and not just humans. I find his work on the “seeking” motivation very interesting and a useful way to conceptualize this basic drive; I continue to think about his distinction between FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF.
- I find both analyses contribute to my understanding. There is some value in dialectical thinking.