The Emotional Foundations of Personality
Page 1
The Emotional
Foundations
of Personality
A Neurobiological and
Evolutionary Approach
Kenneth L. Davis and
Jaak Panksepp
Foreword by Mark Solms
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York • London
The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology
Allan N. Schore, PhD, Series Editor
Daniel J. Siegel, MD, Founding Editor
The field of mental health is in a tremendously exciting period of growth and conceptual reorganization. Independent findings from a variety of scientific endeavors are converging in an interdisciplinary view of the mind and mental well-being. An interpersonal neurobiology of human development enables us to understand that the structure and function of the mind and brain are shaped by experiences, especially those involving emotional relationships.
The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology will provide cutting-edge, multidisciplinary views that further our understanding of the complex neurobiology of the human mind. By drawing on a wide range of traditionally independent fields of research—such as neurobiology, genetics, memory, attachment, complex systems, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology—these texts will offer mental health professionals a review and synthesis of scientific findings often inaccessible to clinicians. These books aim to advance our understanding of human experience by finding the unity of knowledge, or consilience, that emerges with the translation of findings from numerous domains of study into a common language and conceptual framework. The series will integrate the best of modern science with the healing art of psychotherapy.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Foreword by Mark Solms
Introduction. Personality and Basic Human Motivation: Prime Movers
Chapter 1 The Mystery of Human Personality
Chapter 2 Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales and the Big Five
Chapter 3 Darwin’s Comparative “Personality” Model
Chapter 4 William McDougall’s Comparative Psychology: Toward a Naturalistic Personality Approach
Chapter 5 A Brief Review of Personality Since McDougall: The Need for a Bottom-Up Model of Personality
Chapter 6 Bottom-Up and Top-Down Personality Approaches
Chapter 7 Our Ancestral Roots: Personality Research on Great Apes
Chapter 8 The Special Case of Our Canine Companions
Chapter 9 Do Rats Have Personalities? Of Course They Do!
Chapter 10 Animal Personality Summary
Chapter 11 Preludes to the Big Five Personality Model: Different Paths Toward Understanding BrainMind States That Constitute Human Temperaments
Chapter 12 The Big Five: The Essential Core of Cattell’s Factor Analysis
Chapter 13 The Clarities and Confusions of the Big Five
Chapter 14 The Earlier History of Biological Theories of Personality: Hans Eysenck, Jeffrey Gray, and Robert Cloninger
Chapter 15 Genetics and the Origins of Personality
Chapter 16 Human Brain Imaging
Chapter 17 Personality and the Self
Chapter 18 Affective Neuro-Personality and Psychopathology
Chapter 19 Fleshing Out the Complexities
Appendix: The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales
References
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
JAAK PANKSEPP NEEDS TO BE the first words written in this book. He was the inspiration for the book. Indeed, it was his idea for me to write a book applying his years of affective neuroscience research to personality, an area that had interested him, but the ever-pressing demands on his time would not allow him the opportunity to do so on his own. He first suggested the idea at one of the “get away” seminars that Doug Watt had organized. Jaak and I had previously developed the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales, but I would likely have never embarked on such an ambitious journey without Jaak’s encouragement. As the project developed, it became a great privilege to write chapters and work with Jaak as we polished and reworked the content.
But let there be no mistake, Jaak is the central figure in this story, which really began with his insight as a gifted undergraduate psychology student that understanding emotions was the key to understanding people, both their personalities and their pathologies. As his career developed (research that spanned nearly 50 years), Jaak worked with many students and colleagues too numerous to mention to assemble what eventually amounted to a theoretical fortress of evidence (Jaak preferred to speak about evidence rather than proof) that human behavior was built upon a bedrock of emotions that had evolved over millions of years. Perhaps more than anyone else, Jaak Panksepp advanced the nearly 150-year-old Darwinian dictum that “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”
This son of Estonian immigrants to the United States became a tireless advocate that, like humans, other animals subjectively experience feelings and are psychologically motivated by them. Guided by their affective experiences, they are active players in their environments and not robotic automatons. His collective research documented supporting neurochemical and neuroanatomical emotional cross-species homologies, especially between humans and other mammals that led to many therapies and novel insights into the human condition.
In Emotional Foundations, we try to tell Jaak’s story, for the first time, from a personality perspective and try to do it with less technical detail than his previous books. The story explores how affective neuroscience causal (not merely descriptive or correlational) research relates to human motivations and actions and thereby to consistently recognizable patterns of individual behavior, namely, our personalities. Our goal was to share an affective neuroscience personality narrative that would appeal to a broad audience, from those simply interested in exploring personality, to students who were looking for an approach to personality from a neuropsychology/evolutionary point of view, and to professionals—from personality theorists to psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and veterinarians—interested in reading a broad “Pankseppian” interpretation of personality issues.
Sadly, Jaak did not live to see the many hours of work he put into each chapter of our book actually reach print. However, thanks to Deborah Malmud and the staff at W. W. Norton, Emotional Foundations has been refined and formatted to their standards such that Deborah Malmud can now take credit for shepherding two Jaak Panksepp books through to the public including, of course, this last book-length project.
Jaak was my teacher. He became my intellectual anchor. Writing this book was like taking a multi-year seminar with him, almost like doing a postdoc. The remarkable breadth and depth of his knowledge revealed itself in every chapter. His awesome intellect was difficult to challenge. Yet, he never belittled my efforts, and I only remember a single time he criticized me and that was for “getting too far ahead of the data.”
However, Jaak was not the only teacher who facilitated my personal journey. At Earlham College, Dr. Jerry Woolpy, known for his work socializing wolves, took me under his wing by nurturing my budding interest in cross-species studies, and he was responsible for identifying an opportunity to become one of John Paul Scott’s students at Bowling Green State University. Dr. Scott was at the peak of his eminent career in comparative animal behavior and luckily took me on as his student and was able to offer personal and financial support through most of my graduate days. Dr. Bob Conner, who eventually became the chairman of the Bowling Green psychology department, was another of those generous intellects
who somehow managed to work as hard as you did on whatever project needed his attention and served on my graduate committee. However, it was Jaak who took me on as his student after Dr. Scott retired and gave me my first real glimpse of affective neuroscience as he guided me through my dissertation on the “Opioid Control of Canine Social Behavior.”
There are a few others whose support I would like to acknowledge. Anesa Miller, Jaak’s wife, and a published poet and writer in her own right, often went beyond tolerating to even encouraging my visits to their home that on occasion dominated their weekends but which also were critical to my continuing education, as well as the rewriting and reorganizing of book chapters. Another Panksepp student, Larry Normansell, provided extensive support in developing the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales. Dave Gilmore, a good friend, who also helped collect early ANPS data as well as providing support at various times during the writing process.
My children, Matt, Jennifer, and Megan have been consistently supportive and encouraging, even providing good suggestions from time to time. Yet, it is my wife, Nancy, more than anyone else who lived through the many years of writing and rewriting Emotional Foundations. Through what must have sometimes seemed endless, she remained supportive and encouraging, often reading my latest efforts and offering helpful comments.
Ken Davis
November 30, 2017
Foreword
Mark Solms
THE APPROACH TAKEN to personality in this book is revolutionary. It builds upon decades of careful research, not only concerning the development and application of the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales themselves (work which is already being extended by scientists around the world, myself included), but also concerning the monumental program of neuroscientific research upon which the Scales were based. This program of research, itself revolutionary, was conducted by Jaak Panksepp and his students (among whom Ken Davis may be prominently counted). The research builds upon earlier work conducted by such pioneers as Walter Hess and Paul Maclean, starting in the 1920s already. In fact, their work can ultimately be traced all the way back to the seminal observations of Charles Darwin, who dared to suggest that we human beings are after all just another species of animal.
To say that the approach taken to personality in this book is revolutionary is not to say that it is wild or surprising. It is common-sensical and obvious. But this can only be said in retrospect, now that the work has been done. It required the insight of Ken Davis and Jaak Panksepp to see the yawning gap in this field, and then to fill it with the evidence for the new personality assessment instrument they provide in this book. With the book now published, however, it becomes obvious to the rest of us that this is the most sensible way (by far) to classify and measure the basic building blocks of the human personality.
When I say that theirs is the only sensible way to proceed, I must add that we could not have done so before now. The knowledge that was accumulated through the research program of Jaak Panksepp mentioned above was a necessary prerequisite, before Ken Davis and he could do the obvious regarding personality. What I mean is that it is obvious that the classification and measurement of personality must be predicated upon an identification of the “natural kinds” that constitute the actual building blocks of personality; but what are those “natural kinds?” The research upon which this book is based (research that was grounded in deep brain stimulation studies and pharmacological probes, which revealed the elementary emotional circuits of the mammalian brain, and then traced the same circuits—in the same structures, mediated by the same neurochemicals—in the human brain) provides us with nothing less than an answer to this fundamental question.
What could be more valuable for mental science than that?
It may be confidently predicted that the re-conceptualization of personality reported in this book will be followed by a revolution of equal importance (if not greater importance) in the classification and measurement of mental disorders. Just as the instruments that preceded the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales relied upon taxonomies of personality that were generated by blind statistical measures of its superficial features (or worse, culturally and linguistically mediated self conceptions of those features), so too the classification and measurement of psychiatric disorders is embarrassingly arbitrary—grounded in and confounded by the history and conventions of the discipline, rather than empirically based understanding of how the emotional brain really works.
This book heralds a new era of personality research, but there is much more to come from the approach it adopts. It shows the promise of affective neuroscience for the psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy of the future.
The Emotional Foundations of Personality
Introduction
Personality and Basic Human Motivation: Prime Movers
But “feel” is a verb, and to say that what is felt is “a feeling” may be one of those deceptive common-sense suppositions inherent in the structure of language. . . . To feel is to do something. . . .
Feeling stands, in fact, in the midst of that vast biological field which lies between the lowliest organic activities and the rise of mind. . . . It is with the dawn of feeling that the domain of biology yields the less extensive, but still inestimably great domain of psychology.
—Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling
IN SEARCH OF FUNDAMENTAL CAUSES OF PERSONALITY
WHY IS IT THAT each of us can be described by a set of traits that can almost be used as a behavioral fingerprint? The fascination with knowing personality profiles has spawned a multibillion dollar personality testing industry (Economist, 2013, citing Nik Kinley, a coauthor of Talent Intelligence [Kinley & Beh-Hur 2013]). But beyond just describing our behavior, why does one person consistently behave differently than another? What actually causes our behavior? What prods us out of a state of inertia toward any particular goal-directed activity? Moreover, what would we be like without some spark, some prod that could spur us to action—a primary mover that could motivate and guide our behavior?
One hint regarding our prime movers comes from research showing that damage to specific emotional brain structures, with such daunting names as the medial forebrain bundle (Clark, 1938; Teitelbaum & Epstein, 1962; Coenen, Panksepp, Hurwitz, Urbach, & Mädler, 2012) and the periaqueductal gray (Bailey & Davis, 1942, 1943; Depaulis & Bandler, 1991), results in a profound loss of motivation and a condition of helplessness. Due to extreme self-neglect, including even lack of eating and drinking, these subjects require intensive care to keep them alive. It is significant that both of these brain structures are deeply embedded in evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain intimately related to primary process emotions and to motivations, because these two concepts overlap enormously.
That these brain structures are so deeply rooted in our evolutionary past suggests that Mother Nature (meaning the process of evolution) had to answer a basic motivation question early in the evolution of animal life: What would move an animal to action? It is through better understanding of these primary ancestral motivations linked to our ancestral origins that we can more fully appreciate why we feel and act the way we do.
On safari in Africa, if one is fortunate enough to observe a pride of lions, after the initial excitement of such an opportunity one is struck by how inactive the lions are most of the day. One can watch them for hours and see little else than adult lions swishing away flies and lion cubs playing with each other. Is it possible that what one observes lions doing (or not doing) most of the day until they head out for their nightly hunt is the default mammalian state, and if it were not for homeostatic motivations such as hunger and the primary emotions, we would likely lack focused goal-oriented activity?
However, beyond just describing behavior, the essential question for a discussion of personality is, What prods us to act in the ways we do? Why do human babies and puppies try to climb out of their playpens when all their physical and emotional needs seem to be generously provided
through maternal care? What causes us to be so easily focused on a crying baby? What makes children expend so much energy chasing each other about with no apparent purpose?
SUBCORTICAL EMOTIONAL AFFECTIVE SYSTEMS ARE CAUSAL MECHANISMS UNDERLYING PERSONALITY
It is our position throughout this book that, without an understanding of the psychobiological systems underpinning our feelings and actions, our understanding of the motivations behind our behavior is limited to obvious verbal pronouncements, and we may be restricted to just describing behavior, as linked to environmental contingencies, rather than explaining it. (Just describing rather than explaining it is what the Anglo-American behaviorists tried to convince the rest of psychology was quite enough; indeed, they at times argued that in their scheme the study of the brain was not really necessary.) For some purposes, regularly observing how caring a person is in his or her interactions toward other people may suffice, and even the observation of other animals may provide us with enough knowledge to reliably describe past behavior and perhaps predict future interactions. (In a sense this was the behaviorist perspective on what needed to be studied.) However, we are still left without an understanding about the causal mechanisms underlying this person’s gentle interactions with others. It is our premise that all the emotional affective systems that evolution (or Mother Nature, to use the most common metaphor) constructed within the subcortical brain are the primary causal mechanisms underlying our personalities that consistently guide emotional and other motivated actions. In the colorful words of the epigraph’s author, they are evolved affective designs for having “a psychical entity pushing a physical one around” (Langer, 1988, p. 4). Furthering our understanding of these prime movers will enable progress in psychology and psychiatry.
Affective neuroscience, the study of our subcortical affective Brain-Mind,1 has begun to clarify these prime movers—what Freud called the id, his supposedly unconscious foundation for the conscious mind. Now we know that this subcortical terrain of mind is not deeply unconscious (Solms & Panksepp, 2012), but it is a primal mind that can make snap decisions to various life challenges almost instantaneously without the need for reflective thought. For example, imagine yourself on a lovely day peacefully hiking through the woods. Suddenly seeing a large snake just ahead of you would generate immediate fear in most people. It is likely that the closer the snake is to you at that moment, the more intense your alarm would be. If the danger is imminent, your subcortical brain will likely halt all your other activity and prompt you to immediately seek a safer distance, from which you may again become more reflective—at which point some would attempt to observe the snake more carefully and determine whether it is poisonous and how it behaves. That is, you will return to using your upper brain to cognitively evaluate what you are seeing.