Stated another way, each of the above six basic emotions arise from our inherited cerebral tools for living—arising from ancient, highly evolved brain survival systems that color and guide our perceptions and diverse responses to life events. These six brain systems are automatically, continuously, and intimately involved in our interpretations of the life situations we encounter. Our various positive and negative affective feelings are “value indicators”—they are all ancient survival mechanisms genetically passed down through millions of generations, long before modern humans or Neanderthals walked the face of the earth, and they automatically and continuously monitor the world as we encounter it. When it comes to survival, Mother Nature (aka evolution) did not leave foundational survival issues to chance. What she did provide, with ever-increasing generosity to primates, reaching its pinnacle in our species, were higher brain tissues, namely, the most massive neocortical expansions (relative to body size), which allow us to become really smart (and all too often perplexed, indeed confused, about mental life, which is rich mixture of our affective and cognitive abilities).
It is becoming ever clearer that the lower emotional regions of the brain are very important in programming the higher reaches, namely, our various affective feeling systems govern learning processes, allowing each organism to develop cognitions that emerge in lockstep with its temperamental strengths and weaknesses. This often leads to many life situations when people simply do not understand their own motivations or the motivations of others. However, we leave this complex topic for a later time.
TOWARD A NEW PERSONALITY TEST
It is most significant that the above seven basic blue ribbon emotional brain systems are shared not only by all humans but also by all other mammals. So, your pet dogs and cats have these evolutionarily related brain emotional systems in common with humans—SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, CARE, PANIC and PLAY. (Although, as mentioned, we focus only on six, we occasionally reflect on LUST in some later chapters.) Indeed, the subject of animal personalities is reviewed in Chapter 10. For now, we emphasize that the existence of these brain systems, which are affectively (albeit perhaps not cognitively) experienced by all animals that possess them, makes these animals sentient—creatures that experience themselves in the world. The direct evidence for the existence of experienced feelings in nonspeaking animals is the simple fact that whenever we artificially arouse those systems, as with electrical deep brain stimulation (DBS), both animals and humans experience those states. Humans can directly tell us about their feelings, while we must interrogate animals that cannot speak through their behavioral choices. They can inform us of their likes and dislikes by either voluntarily turning on brain stimulation, as for SEEKING, CARE, and PLAY systems (these evoked states are rewarding), or turning off brain stimulation, as for RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC (for overviews, see Panksepp, 1998a, 2005; Panksepp & Biven, 2012). Accordingly, we developed a new human personality inventory to monitor how these shared emotions are expressed as distinct dimensions of human temperaments—a test we call the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS), presented more fully in Chapter 2 (for latest versions, see Davis & Panksepp, 2011 and the appendix).
Panksepp and his students have extensively studied and provided formal scientific names for these six brain systems. They are written in all capital letters to give them some separation from vernacular usages—to indicate that their meanings are not identical with their lowercase equivalents. Thus, the formal scientific names for these brains systems are SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. We have so far learned about the fundamental evolved nature of these emotional systems more by studying animal brains than human ones. The first three emotion systems, SEEKING, RAGE, and FEAR, have very ancient origins, because they can be traced back to reptiles and even fish. The other three, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY, are more uniquely mammalian and give mammals their higher social abilities (for instance, the CARE/Nurturance system may be one of the main sources of empathy; for a discussion see Panksepp & Panksepp, 2013). All six have been repeatedly shown to be linked to distinct personality differences across cultures, with early ANPS translations into German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Turkish, and various other languages. The seventh system, sexual LUST, bridges ancient socioerotic SEEKING urges and mammalian desires to CARE for young and for the young to PLAY with each other. Clearly some females and males are more LUSTy than others, and this could also be viewed as a personality dimension, but we chose not to include it in the ANPS—as mentioned above, we were concerned that many people would not wish to reveal this aspect of their personality to strangers and suspected that if it were included, negative affective responses to such personal questions might turn people off and thereby potentially affect their responses to some of the other emotional dimensions. It is also noteworthy that we are aware of no other personality inventory that currently includes sexuality as a personality factor (nor do they evaluate homeostatic affects like hunger and thirst, which LUST may be conceptually closer to than the other emotions, because it is also controlled by bodily states, such as hormone levels).
UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL PRIMES MAY BE ESSENTIAL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE NEUROSCIENCE OF PERSONALITY
Before we turn to personality testing, we briefly describe these fundamental emotional systems of the brain:
The SEEKING system may have originally evolved as a general-purpose foraging system (a “seek and find” system) energizing the search for food and other resources needed for survival. With other life goals, the function of this all important system (which probably lies at the core of our feelings of “selfhood,” a topic we return to in Chapter 17) was evolutionarily broadened to energize the exploration for resources in general.
The RAGE system responds when the loss of resources is threatened—for example, loss of food, family, or money—and prepares the body to fight to get them back if necessary. We also sometimes call it the RAGE/Anger system, as a reminder that these fundamental systems probably link up reasonably well to our vernacular use of traditional emotional labels.
The FEAR/Anxiety system identifies and predicts when dangers are imminent and prepares the body to either freeze or flee, depending on which response will be most adaptive.
The CARE/Nurturance system motivates and coordinates the caretaking and rearing of infants from the time they are totally dependent newborns throughout the long period of early childhood development (although, of course, the youngsters of others species are typically not called their children). However, the CARE system may also motivate social helping behaviors in general.
The PANIC/Sadness system is engaged, especially in youngsters, when they lose contact with their mothers—we assume this is the feeling of psychological distress/pain that all infant mammals and birds suddenly feel when they lose close contact with supportive others. It is often associated with crying in children separated from their parents, with the death of a loved one, and with social rejection in general. At times we have also called it the Grief system or the Sadness system, because many people don’t understand the implications of PANIC—the extremely agitated state young animals exhibit when they are lost or even accidentally separated from parents for even very short periods of time.
The PLAY/Joy system motivates physical social-engagement (aka “rough-and-tumble”) play in all young mammals and commonly provides an affectively positive developmental context for learning how to socially interact with others, which thereby facilitates social integration in general.
At their fundamental (primary-process) level, each of these six brain systems can be thought of as distinct instincts (unconditioned responses in behavioral parlance) consisting of highly integrated ways of being and acting in the world—survival systems that help engender and solidify abundant learning. They are all natural systems, meaning their basic brain structures and functions have been inherited and hence do not require individual learning (although the systems may be refined by being used). It has long been clear that we do not need to teach chil
dren to play or to feel panic when they have lost contact with their parents.
Of course, that does not mean that these instincts cannot be modified by life experiences and that related behavior patterns cannot be modified through learning for adaptive integration with current environmental circumstances. Indeed, these six brain systems govern much of the early learning that children spontaneously exhibit. For example, children quickly learn which of their friends play nicely and are most friendly toward them. They also learn that the dog that bit them was threatening when it growled and to fear and avoid growling dogs in the future, especially if they were nipped at. In short, the fundamental affective guidance provided by these six behavioral-emotional systems can be thought of as ancestral tools for living that we are born with. They are genetically provided “original equipment” that provide rapid, inborn (instinctual) answers to life challenges—ways of behaving and feeling that promoted survival of ancestral mammals many, many millions of years ago.
These six behavioral-emotional systems may be stronger or weaker in different species, but all exist to some extent in all mammalian species. They are essential for survival and, with learning, become ever more deeply embedded in our personalities. They are action-oriented systems that consistently bias our perceptions, thoughts, and actions; they are elaborated in our lives as stable behavioral-feeling patterns that contribute substantially to the growth of our personalities. Most people do not think of “motor” or “action-generating” systems as having any consciousness, but these systems have a feel to them that seems to be an intrinsic part of their organization. As noted earlier, artificial activation with electrical DBS in animals, just like natural activation in humans, feels good and bad in various ways. In formal animal-behavioral terms, these systems can be shown to be rewarding or punishing, and that is the only scientific measures of affective feelings we have in nonspeaking animals (Panksepp, 1998a). In this affective sense, all vertebrate species are conscious—they experience themselves in the world. Of course, this does not necessarily mean they are aware that they are experiencing—that higher level of reflective consciousness is reserved for animals that know they possess awareness (i.e., knowing one is experiencing), which is much harder to study in other animals than whether they feel positive or negative—good or bad in the vernacular.
THE NATURE OF THE PRIMAL EMOTIONAL AFFECTS
This point is very important: These six emotions engender feeling states within the brain (as does LUST), and these experiential characteristics are especially important when we talk about personality. Each emotion has an affective component that feels either good or bad. These affects, or feelings, are either pleasant or aversive, even in other animals. They help automatically inform animals, including humans, which internal conditions of the brain are rewarding, and hence support survival, and which are punishing, signaling that survival may be in jeopardy. Again, the SEEKING, CARE, and PLAY emotions are experienced as desirable feelings (rewarding affects), whereas the FEAR, RAGE, and PANIC emotions are all experienced as aversive feelings (punishing affects to use behavioristic language).
On the positive side, the SEEKING system provides us with a very special euphoric “buzz” (we humans commonly call it enthusiasm) as we explore possibilities and anticipate desired outcomes. The CARE system infuses us with a “warm glow” as we support the lives of our children and help others overcome their problems. The CARE system, along with the PANIC/Sadness system, may be especially important for engendering our feelings of empathy and sympathy when bad things happen to nearby others, but especially to those that we love. The PLAY system fills us with “delight” as we have fun with our friends.
On the negative side, the RAGE/Anger system sparks feelings of “irritation” and directs us to “attack” whoever or whatever threatens us or our possessions. The FEAR system makes us anxious, indeed can grip us with “terror” when we sense that our life or well-being is in danger. The PANIC/Sadness system overwhelms us with “desperate helplessness,” a painful distress (that can gradually become despair) we felt when as children we lost contact with our parents, or later in life when we lose (or are suddenly locked out of) a close, sustaining relationship.
The affective tone of our personal world—the world we individually perceptually live in at an affective level—is constructed by the positive or negative valence of these affects. In other words, it is among the pleasant or aversive qualities of these emotional feelings that we often find the value of our experiences. We positively value and are attracted to situations and experiences we associate with good feelings. We avoid and place negative values on situations and experiences that feel bad. Indeed, although many animal researchers are shy about even talking about the feelings of the animals they study (often just prefering to study learning and memory, where such concepts do not seem necessary), it seems likely that the various evolved feeling-generating systems (primal emotional affects) actually directly control many of the learning and memory processes of human and animal brains. This is a complex neurochemical story that we will not address here (but for a readable synopsis, see Panksepp & Biven, 2012, chap. 6).
IN SUM
It is surprising that no personality test has tried to represent all of these brain emotional systems explicitly and equally. As we describe in the chapters that follow, during the past century many personality tests were developed. Some did represent features such as anxiety and aggressiveness, and even curiosity (sometimes called “openness to experience”), but none focused on the whole package that we describe here. Partly this is because more recent personality tests typically started from a “top-down” perspective, from the many words and concepts we use to describe one another’s temperaments. Within the complexity of words, scientists were more prone to use complex statistics to ferret out consistent patterns among the adjectives we use to describe one another. Perhaps because an understanding of the basic brain emotional systems requires cross-species neuroscience, no one has used the full riches of our emerging understanding of the basic emotional systems of our brains, so critically important for creating our feeling of selfhood, as one critical foundation pillar for personality theory.
The ANPS that we describe in this book attempts to do that, and in so doing it allows us to better connect our increasing understanding of the brain sources of basic human emotions to the kinds of knowledge (e.g., understanding the anatomies and chemistries of these systems) that can currently be achieved by studying the brains and behaviors of other animals. In a sense, our approach is much closer to the classical medieval approaches to personality, with their four major temperamental types—sanguine (PLAYful), choleric (RAGEful), melancholic (full of that PANICy psychic pain that we commonly call sadness), and phlegmatic (the coldness of temperaments that arises perhaps from too much anxiety engendered by excessive FEAR).
Why was SEEKING not represented? Perhaps because the ancients implicitly recognized it was a universal part of mental life itself (as encapsulated in the concept of conatus, the essential force or urge underlying human effort and striving; within the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza this was the psychological “force” in every living creature to preserve its own existence (for an excellent and readable overview, see Ravven, 2013), which in its most positive form becomes the very ground of “social joy” so magnificently represented in happy-sanguine temperaments. Why was CARE not represented? Perhaps because it was more highly feminine and simply accepted as something that women are skilled at, while males are not, for the temper of those times was governed so much more by men than during our more enlightened era. And, of course, everyone knew about LUST, but for a long time few wished to talk about it openly. Before we start summarizing where we have been as humans (and at time scientists) interested in human personality, during the past century and a half of scientific psychology, we will proceed in the next chapter to our own neoclassical view of human personality as represented in the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS).
CHAPTER
2
Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales and the Big Five
Delgado, Roberts, and Miller (1954) have shown that cats will learn to turn a wheel to avoid the unpleasant emotion of fear produced when certain parts of the brain [hypothalamus] are stimulated. The cats act as if the sensation or feelings produced by electrically stimulating the brain are real emotions. We may anticipate that this same demonstration will eventually be made with the emotion of anger.
—John Paul Scott, Aggression
IN THIS CHAPTER we introduce the major personality model for which there is the greatest agreement among personality psychologists, the Big Five, with discrete factors for Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience. And we contrast this model with our emotional-trait-focused Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS). This new way of looking at personality is admittedly a radical departure from the history of the field, and before continuing with that complex history, we highlight why such a radical shift is needed in order to integrate our emerging understanding of the neural infrastructure of primal emotional feelings with our understanding of human personality.
The Emotional Foundations of Personality Page 4