The Emotional Foundations of Personality

by Kenneth L Davis

  These blue ribbon emotions provide a window into our deeper, some may say “true,” nature. We all experience the world through the lenses of these emotions. And understanding how strong or weak an influence each of these emotions has on our personal ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving is a good first step toward understanding ourselves. If we resolve to make needed adjustments in our lives, basing our efforts on an understanding of our deeper nature is likely to make our attempts more fruitful. In a sense, we are all survivors of the same evolutionary seas, cruising in similar boats, but in many different lakes, with slightly different patterns of affective winds in our sails. These winds are distinct personality dimensions, and a key that has been missing in personality theory is a credible cross-species neuroscientific foundation of those personality dimensions. That is why we developed the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales and have written this book.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Mystery of Human Personality

  We need to be agnostics first and then there is some chance at arriving at a sensible system of belief.

  —D. Elton Trueblood

  20th-century American Quaker author and philosopher

  AS YOU READ THIS BOOK, you will be exposed to a view of human personality from a distinctly new vantage. If you are a seasoned student of personality, we hope you can briefly put aside your previous training in personality theory and suspend judgment for a while, for you may appreciate a novel approach to personality contained within these pages—one that arises from the study of the primal (evolved) emotional systems of mammalian brains rather than the diverse personality traits enshrined in the study of human languages. In any case, we hope you will find the present approach fresh and challenging, for here we focus on personality, perhaps for the first time, from the perspective of the actual neurobiologically ingrained emotional systems of mammalian brains (even though there are others who have conceptually initiated such endeavors—Robert Cloninger (2004), Richard DePue (1995), and Jeffrey Gray (1982) come easily to mind).

  Of course, emotionality has traditionally been seen as the foundation of personality. That is, the classic view was based on the supposition that various presumed bodily forces (humors) that control our moods were the foundation of our temperaments. According to medieval scholars of personality, some people are sanguine, basically happy and easygoing, while others are choleric, easily irritated and willing to show their anger. Some are phlegmatic, slow, ponderous, and uninteresting (basically cold fish), and yet others are melancholic, chronically sad and depressed.

  Various later approaches to personality were based on clinical experiences and insights, because many of the early personality theorists were therapists and psychiatrists (see examples in Chapter 5). Their patients were primarily people with serious behavioral and/or emotional problems, so it was natural for these early personality theorists to try to distinguish their patients on the basis of temperamental differences and to assign them to diagnostic categories. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) had compiled a taxonomy of psychological “diseases” based on medical diagnostics derived from distinct patterns of psychologically evident symptoms. One of the diagnoses Kraepelin is well known for is schizophrenia, which he originally labeled dementia praecox, or premature dementia or precocious madness, because it usually began in the late teens or early adulthood.2

  If you are a therapist, physician, psychiatrist, or some other medical professional, we note that this book does not focus on using personality or personality tests to try to diagnose psychiatric problems or personality disorders, even though it may provide insights to understanding people with diverse mental problems. It is more about trying to explore the ancestral neural roots of personality, what personality means, and to gain a deeper appreciation for the individual differences that make each of us human beings on this planet not only unique but also inheritors of emotional ways of being in the world that are reflected in characteristic personalities. When extreme, such personality traits can be seen to reflect psychiatrically significant personality tendencies. As we describe in several chapters, neurogenetic findings are providing abundant support for ingrained emotional foundations for human and animal personalities. Such emerging knowledge will eventually change the way we understand human personalities as well as psychiatric disorders.

  The science of psychiatry is experiencing a crisis of confidence in traditional psychiatric diagnostic categories, which was illustrated with the unveiling of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V; American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Many psychiatrists still believe that such diagnostic traditions, which arose from the way physicians learned to describe characteristic bodily disorders in the middle of the nineteenth century, are essential for progress in the field. This transformation toward a systematic classification of mental disorders, inspired by a coterie of physicians in Germany called the Berlin Biophysics Club, aimed to establish medicine on a solid scientific foundation. However, there is a growing consensus that this might not have been the best way to proceed with the diversity of mental disorders that psychiatrists currently deal with. Recognizing that we really have no good evidence for homogeneous types of brain problems that underlie many psychiatric diagnostic labels (including autism, depression, schizophrenia, and most especially personality disorders), many favor falling back on simply using consistent symptoms, namely, fundamental psychophysiological signs (the so-called endophenotypes) that may reflect the changing activities of distinct brain circuits, as a better way to approach human personality and psychiatric problems, in ways that can be scientifically linked to distinct brain systems.

  Of course, the ongoing debate on the nature of human personality and the value of diagnostics in psychiatry is by no means resolved. Disagreements and debate are bound to remain with us for a long time, especially in psychiatry, because conceptual categories provide useful ways to standardize ways to prescribe increasingly large numbers of drugs that are becoming readily available to treat the various DSM-specified psychiatric categories. Regrettably, the range in medicinal effects varies enormously, and only a few have been developed by trying to model the relevant shifts in affective states in animals (for recent summaries, see Panksepp, Wright, Döbrössy, Schlaepfer, & Coenen, 2014; Panksepp & Yovell, 2014; Panksepp, 2015, 2016).

  We do not delve into this active area of debate but note that the relationship between the psychiatric profession and pharmaceutical companies has solidified to such an extent that it would take a great deal of scientific data to change established practices. Robert Whitaker’s frank critique and hard-hitting condemnation of this area of medicine (see Whitaker, 2010) has emerged from the recognition that many current mind medicines often precipitate mental/personality problems other than the ones clients started with. Indeed, medicinally induced shifts in the chemistries of mind can provoke strong “opponent processes” that gradually destabilize chemistries to such an extent that feelings of normality can no longer be achieved. We return to psychiatric issues toward the end of this book in Chapter 18. Our immediate goal is to focus on the normal variability of human personality arising from the diverse characteristics of our core emotional systems and to discuss how this knowledge can help us better understand ourselves.

  It is hard to define what is psychologically normal. Obviously there are many cultural and other environmental variables that impact development, but neuroscientists are revealing that it is partly based on the emotional strengths and weaknesses we are born with—variation arising from the brain manifestations of one’s genetic heritage, which are typically further shaped by individual experiences. As we describe in this book, this perspective has been amply affirmed through the identification of many genetic predispositions for diverse personality traits. But because every baby confronts the “booming, buzzing” confusions of its surrounding social world, to borrow William James’s terms for newborn mental life, we also have to pay atte
ntion to how genes are influenced by environments. The concept of epigenesis captures the simple fact that environmentally induced influences on gene expression are as influential in the construction of stable personality as one’s hereditary endowment of genes (see Chapter 15). The stability of these early influences, as expressed in the construction of basic brain circuits that control emotional feelings—more so than other affects, for example, bodily sensory and homeostatic ones—are the very bedrock of personality development. These are what modern biological psychiatrists would call the endophenotypes of the mind—the natural affective processes that guide the individualized paths of learning and memory. Indeed, not all of the types of feelings we are born with, neither the sensory ones (sweet delights and dreadful disgusts) nor the bodily homeostatic urges experienced as hunger and thirst, are as influential as the emotional systems that exist inside our brains, conveying various basic affective feelings, the strengths and weaknesses of which constitute, we suggest, the most influential brain endophenotypes for personality development.

  OUR THEORETICAL ORIENTATION

  Each human being is unique. Our faces and voices easily identify us as individuals. We now know that each of us is endowed, by heredity, with our own unique genetic patterns. Even identical twins develop differences over their life-span, through epigenetic effects, as well as, of course, learning (Fraga et al., 2005). While it might initially be more obvious that our physical features are different, it is also true that each of our personalities is unique as well. However, one of the great puzzles in psychology has been how to explain the origin and development of rather stable personality similarities and differences seen across many individuals. Even though we know there are strong genetic influences on our individual traits and characteristics, the sciences of psychology and neuroscience have struggled to explain how those genetic differences emerge into personality differences (Crews, Gillette, Miller-Crews, Gore, & Skinner, 2014; Weaver et al., 2014).

  A partial explanation and one of the themes of this book is that our personalities are all different because of our underlying genetically based as well as environmentally promoted emotional differences that lead each of us to perceive and react to the world differently. Our unique personalities are a reflection of how we individually experience and respond to the world. Because we cannot experience our environments directly but must rely on our brains to interpret each life event, we all experience the world in our own unique ways. In a way, each of us lives in a different world because we each perceive the world somewhat differently, although in the midst of abundant differences, there are also abiding traits we share with many others.

  Of course, none of us perceives our world directly. Our perceptions of the world are constructed by the brain. For instance, vision arises from light waves entering our eyes. However, our eyes do not directly “see” images; we perceive only a narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum that allows us to have vision. The light-sensitive receptors in our eyes are capable of detecting only points of light energy, like pixels on a computer screen. Some of these receptors, the cones, respond to different-frequency light waves, which create a primary experience of red, green, and blue colors. However, the eye itself does not have the capacity for identifying whole images. It is primarily our visual cortex—just under the skull at the back of our heads—that processes the ascending signals from the light receptors in our eyes, which through successive ascending neural refinements identifies subtler color differences, as well as features such as lines, motion, and eventually actual images. All perceptions—from color to objects—are created by brain functions that are experienced as representations of the world.

  It requires yet another level of processing to give meaning to the images we eventually “see,” and it is at this level that we begin interpreting and adding affectively experienced values to images. It is at this stage of interpreting and adding value when major individual differences begin to emerge that provide each of us with foundational pillars for our various unique personalities. It is when we try to make sense of our images that we all begin to “see” the world in our own personal way. It is at this point that our emotional personality differences begin to become more apparent. For example, when we see a baby, we are not all equally attracted to the little one; some of us feel more warm and nurturing toward babies (females usually more than males). When we see a stranger, we are not all equally suspicious of or friendly toward the stranger; some of us feel more wary and anxious toward strangers. These feelings have been the most mysterious aspects of psychology, with little agreement on how they should be discussed, conceptualized, or studied. Our perspective here is that it is within the intrinsic strengths and weaknesses of our emotional feelings that we will find the major primal forces for the development of personality differences.

  As we add our affective feelings and values to life events, we simultaneously have different thoughts and memories, as well as different behavioral reactions. The fact that two people can stand side by side and yet perceive the same scene differently with different feelings, interpretations, thoughts, and actions is what adds uniqueness to our personalities. Try this exercise with a mix of friends who are willing to cooperate in a little experiment: Ask them to imagine a somewhat bedraggled person walking toward them at dusk in a lonely parking lot as they unlock their car after a long day at work. Give them some paper and ask them to write down their likely feelings and to provide a little more information about the person approaching them. Then ask your friends to share their notes with the group. If you are fortunate enough to have a variety of personalities participating in your little game, you may be amazed at the range of responses you hear. Some will likely be concerned about the health of the person or whether the person is lost or hungry. Others may express fear of the stranger, and still others may respond with some hostility toward the vagrant. In this case, perhaps you will see differences in care and kindness—flexible empathic urges on one hand and dogmatic authoritarian and punitive ones on the other. It is these differences of feelings, interpretation, thoughts, and reactions that provide windows into our basic personality differences.

  THE AFFECTIVE FOUNDATIONS OF PERSONALITY

  A fuller explanation of our personality differences is that these feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and behavior reactions are all wrapped up and packaged (intimately integrated) as our various instinctive emotions. Each of the many primary emotions we have inherited is basically an evolutionarily adaptive action system with intrinsic valences—various positive and negative feelings—reflecting in part that all mammals are born with the capacity to express and experience a set of primal emotions. In his 1998 text Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp described seven of the primal emotional responses shared by all mammals, including humans. They are capitalized as SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY, to highlight their primary-process inherited nature (although this does not mean that their typical activities are not modulated by living in the world–indeed, they guide a great deal of learning). Each emotion not only has its own characteristic feelings but also guides perceptual interpretations, thoughts, and behavioral reactions, both unlearned and learned. However, the strength and sensitivity of each brain emotion system, as well as the developmental learning it has guided, vary from individual to individual. So, there is substantial variation across different people in each of these basic emotion systems, part of it inherited and part of it learned. Such variations in each of these brain emotional responses promote different perceptions and reactions that map onto diverse higher-order traits and personality characteristics—from a broad and open friendliness to a narrow and obsessive neuroticism. In developing our ideas about human personality, we discarded LUST—our sexual urgencies—as perhaps a bit “too hot to handle”: important but often so personal that people may avoid frankness in rating their other personality traits. In other words, inquiring about people’s sexual interests may be just too personal, which may promote diminished frankness about ot
her personality dimensions.

  The following are brief examples of the six blue ribbon emotions we focused on in developing our new Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (to be introduced shortly):

  We all get curious and energized during new experiences, whether about new neighbors moving in next door or the excitement of buying a new car, especially our first one (all such activities entail SEEKING).

  We are all frustrated when we do not get the job we want and perhaps more than a little irritated when family members do not do their share of the work (we can all get enRAGEd).

  Most of us are afraid of snakes and bears and no doubt would be a bit anxious if we were lost in the woods or had to walk alone through a rundown neighborhood in a strange city. The capacity for FEARfulness is built into us.

  Many of us would feel especially tenderhearted and CAREing toward baby animals and might be inclined to give a little money to a homeless beggar.

  We all feel loneliness and psychological pain that comes with broken relationships, especially the death of a loved one, and a similar feeling of “separation distress” when we are socially marginalized or rejected; we call this feeling PANIC/Sadness.

  We all enjoy having fun with our friends and laughing at a good joke, which are all related to ancestral PLAY urges that we still share with the other mammals.

  While we humans do share emotional feelings illustrated by these six examples, all are not equally expressed in our individual personalities. That is, while we all enjoy having fun with friends, some of us are much more friendly than others and more inclined to seek out opportunities for social fun. While many of us, especially females, are prone to feel tenderness toward baby animals, few of us would be moved to actually take home a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest to try to save it. So, the strength of our inclinations and reactions associated with each of these six emotions can differ dramatically across individuals. It is the variation across these six powers of the BrainMind, with their different feelings, typically exhibited in distinct life circumstances, which have been developmentally well integrated with our perceptions, thoughts, and behavioral reactions, that help constitute our diverse, often unique personalities.