The Emotional Foundations of Personality

by Kenneth L Davis

  So what do these results mean in primal terms? We hypothesized that brain’s PLAY system is the “root” of Big Five Extraversion. Likewise, the SEEKING system appeared to be the biological foundation of Openness to Experience. Emotional Stability seemed to be a conglomeration of all three negative primary affects: RAGE/Anger, FEAR, and PANIC/Sadness. Lastly, Agreeableness in Big Five terms seemed to be a bipolar “love-hate” dimension, with CARE on the love end and RAGE/Anger on the hate end. These data thus supported our cross-species affective neuroscience perspective that the biological sources of personality arise substantially from the primary emotion networks embedded in subcortical brain regions (often mistakenly called the subcortex).

  It seemed ever more likely that these ancestral foundations of affectively motivated (perhaps even purposeful) behaviors, extensively documented in mammals and birds, were also operating in humans. Our approach further suggested that the sensitivity of these six genetically endowed unconditional emotional response systems could be adjusted and adapted to our particular environments at the secondary level by ongoing affectively guided learning (i.e., “reinforcement” may reflect how affective circuits control memory formation). Also, the diverse expressions of the six primary emotions and the secondary-level refinements could be regulated or amplified at the tertiary level by our thoughts and ruminations (more on processing levels in Chapter 5). However, at the core of each of these personality dimensions lies the ancient genetics, molded by survival needs for millions of years, creating primal affective tools for living within ancient regions of the BrainMind that continuously shaped attitudes and behaviors that helped us survive. For some reason this is a radical idea in psychology, but that may be partly due to the behaviorist tradition, which still guides much animal research, as well as the fact that most psychologists remain poorly trained in the cross-species affective neurosciences.

  Conscientiousness

  Conscientiousness was the only Big Five dimension that did not prominently correlate with any of the ANPS scales. This suggested to us that Conscientiousness did not represent a primary emotion. Indeed, conducting yourself in an organized, systematic manner and carefully planning your activities would seem to represent a fairly high-level cognitive trait, perhaps commonly pursued in the absence of strong primal emotional feelings. There were some lower, but still statistically significant, negative correlations of Conscientiousness with the three aversive ANPS scales—RAGE/Anger, FEAR, and PANIC/Sadness. Because higher Conscientiousness scores were associated with lower negative affect scores, this suggested the idea that Conscientiousness is reducing (perhaps regulating) the emotional expression of at least the three negative primary emotions. But, in contrast to the other results, this finding has not always been confirmed in subsequent cross-cultural research. Yet, it is possible that conscientious people have a natural faculty or have acquired the ability to limit the unpleasant effects of negative emotion systems in their lives. However, one could argue even more broadly that the Big Five Conscientious dimension is measuring the personality capacity to regulate emotionality in general, both positive and negative, depending on each individual’s particular emotional sensitivities.

  To Lump or Not to Lump

  Why do the Big Five statistics place the three traits measured by the RAGE/Anger, FEAR, and PANIC/Sadness scales on a single trait, namely, the Emotional Stability personality dimension? Each of the ANPS scales represents a separate powerful emotion with distinct implications for pathological as well as more everyday behaviors. For example, a patient coming to a psychologist with a spider phobia would be treated differently than one complaining about depression and a litany that “life did not seem worth living.” Further, a patient with temper issues would be approached very differently than a patient with anxiety problems. Why would affects as different as RAGE/Anger, FEAR, and PANIC/Sadness all be lumped together? However, because statistical results drive the Big Five more than theory, a better question might be why the statistics defining the Big Five personality model show such close associations between all three negative primary-process emotions.

  Difficulty Differentiating Among Emotions at the Tertiary-processing Level

  A possible explanation to the question above is that many humans have difficulty verbally differentiating among the three primary negative emotions. Hence, their rating of questions asking about different sorts of unpleasantness may not be distinctive enough to statistically drive the anger, fear, and sadness types of items into distinct factors. For example, in working with patients suffering from panic attacks, Donald Klein has reported that, after patients were given a drug that reduced their panic attacks (which may reflect sudden PANIC circuit arousals), patients reported no beneficial effect. Further analysis showed that the patients had not noticed any improvement because they still experienced strong general anxieties (FEAR) that they might have another panic attack (Klein, 1993).

  Therapists often report that patients have difficulty accurately describing their feelings. Therapists have experimented with techniques, such as writing about experiences, to enrich patients’ descriptions and improve progress in therapy (Paez, Velasco, & Gonzalez, 1999). Distinctions among loneliness, worry, and irritation may not seem very clear to many patients, at least linguistically, even though they may be quite distinct experientially. Maybe language gets in the way and it is sometimes difficult for people to link feelings to descriptive language. The primary emotional action systems evolved long before human spoken language.

  People also seem to vary in how much they even notice their feelings (Gasper & Bramesfeld, 2006). When prodded to explain what is bothering them, people are likely to offer vague responses like “I don’t know,” or “It’s hard to describe.” Regarding work, you might hear responses like “I just don’t have any energy,” or “I just can’t seem to get motivated.” We are often no better at explaining why we like or dislike things. For whatever reason, it seems the neocortical function of human speech and the learned conceptual distinctions at the tertiary level of analysis are not always fully integrated with older subcortical mammalian brain functions. Further, a little-studied function of the neocortex is to provide inhibition to and regulation over primary-process emotional arousals. In other words, diverse neocortical inhibition may be common in enculturated human adults, even to the point where they can’t easily talk about feelings. Indeed, the failure to have good language for emotions is called alexithymia.

  Factor Analysis and Latent Factors

  Another explanation of why the Big Five mixes all the negative affects into a single dimension may have to do with the Big Five being derived from factor analysis, a statistical method for identifying latent factors in correlational data. If, as described previously, people sometimes have difficulty describing the subtle differences of their negative emotions, why would we be surprised that factor analysis might lump them together in one statistical bucket regardless of the diversity of underlying affective processes? So, perhaps more than anything, that the Big Five does not differentiate well among the RAGE/Anger, FEAR, and PANIC/Sadness systems and lumps them into a single dimension illustrates the limitations of factor analysis. It is not that factor analysis is something personality theorists should avoid—it is a valuable tool for many psychologists. It is just that for statistical reasons it might not always produce an accurate representation of our neurobiologically dictated emotional nature.

  Should Factor Analysis Limit Our Thinking About Personality?

  A related question is why theorists have allowed factor-analytic statistics to limit their thinking about personality structure. Why should personality theorists accept factor analysis as the standard for parsing human personality space? A partial answer is that, prior to the widespread acceptance of factor analysis in psychology, there were many competing personality theories and competing psychological assessments, which were difficult to differentiate and integrate. Psychological personality tests produced various numbers of trait scores. For example
, Eysenck (1967) claimed there were only three psychological traits, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoticism; the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator following Jung’s theory claimed four, Extraversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuiting, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving; Harrison Gough (Gough & Bradley, 1996) produced twenty empirically defined “folk” traits; Douglas Jackson generated twenty factor-analytically defined traits; and there are many others with intermediate numbers of personality traits.

  Factor analysis came into its own with the advent of more powerful computers to carry out the heavy computational demands and promised to become a “theory-free” way to objectively decide not only how many but also what factors were needed to explain personality. While this issue is still debated, the Big Five emerged as a widely accepted model, perhaps prematurely. Our argument is that we have to understand the neurobiology of basic emotional states to have a more comprehensive and accurate assessment of human personality, and when neuroscience can demonstrate clear cross-species distinctions among various instinctive emotional systems, perhaps neuroscience should be given priority over statistics.

  BIG FIVE SUMMARY

  The Big Five represents the statistical analysis of how human linguistic descriptors (especially adjectives) characterize behavior, without considering whether they are comprehensive, equally balanced descriptors (i.e., how many adjectives actually relate to the various basic emotions). Human language has recorded the collective observations of behavior honed over millions of years. The wisdom and knowledge embedded in diverse language traditions are of course subject matter for the fascinating field of linguistics. The simplest descriptors of behavior are adjectives such as “outgoing,” “friendly,” “methodical,” “anxious,” and “creative.” Rating behavior using such adjectives was the method used by Lewis Goldberg (1990), in many respects the “father” of the Big Five, to repeatedly demonstrate the statistical parsing of behavior ratings into five personality traits. Although factor-analyzing simple descriptive sentences such as “I prefer people who are quiet and reserved,” as well as ratings of adjectives, has consistently produced support for the Big Five personality dimensions, perhaps it is time to stop relying purely on statistics to identify the “latent,” underlying personality dimensions, especially because affective neuroscience has already provided extensive evidence for distinct universal emotional action systems in the mammalian brain.

  In other words, the Big Five might, in part, be a statistical artifact of human language processing at the tertiary level. Certainly the Big Five model is not a direct representation of primary brain processes. Indeed, prior to a cross-species affective neuroscience (Panksepp, 1998a), there was no comprehensive brain model to link the Big Five factors to brain emotional systems. We are not suggesting that human language does not contain valuable information about human experience, only that allowing language to determine the primary dimensions of human personality may be getting the cart before the horse. It is the diverse manifestations of evolved mammalian primary-process emotions, which long preceded language, that human language is attempting to describe and that subsequently factor analysis is attempting to parse.

  Prior to the advent of neuroscience, the factor analysis of language descriptor ratings may have been the most objective (and theory-free) guide for the parsing of personality, and it still remains a useful personality tool. However, given the extensive direct neuroscience evidence for primary brain emotional networks, it seems counterproductive to allow our studies of personality, and resulting conclusions, to be limited simply to statistical language analysis.

  It also does not seem that sensory and homeostatic affects are typically seen as relevant for personality. Why is that? Perhaps because we typically interact with one another with a continuous background of emotional feelings rather than sensory and homeostatic ones, and personality is fundamentally about our interpersonal emotional affective strengths and weaknesses rather than the many other affective feelings (e.g., homeostatic and sensory) that are really important for governing both physical health and our immediate psychological sense of well-being. It would appear that the time is ripe for personality theory to both broaden and narrow its perspective and integrate reliable neuroscience-based emotional research into the tools used to parse the human BrainMind into meaningful and useful personality dimensions. As a step toward this integration process, we constructed the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales.

  This topic is discussed further in later chapters devoted specifically to the Big Five/Five-Factor Model, but for now, we suggest that the medieval approaches to human personality—from sanguine and melancholic to choleric and phlegmatic—were closer to what should be conceptualized as foundational issues for understanding human personality than the modern theory-free Big Five that has captivated the field of personality psychology. We now return to the main historical threads that led to the Big Five, and modern personality theory in academic psychology.

  CHAPTER 3

  Darwin’s Comparative “Personality” Model

  My first child was born December 27th, 1839, and I at once commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various expressions which he exhibited, for I felt convinced, even at this early period, that the most complex and fine shades of expression must all have had a gradual and natural origin.

  —Charles Darwin, Autobiography

  HOW CAN WE GAIN a coherent perspective on the seemingly chaotic multitude of existing personality models? If it’s an evolutionary grounding in personality theory you are looking for, Charles Darwin is a pretty good place to start. Indeed, the scientific study of personality really began with Darwin. Even though he did not focus explicitly on that aspect of his work, he forever changed how science viewed the human experience. Centuries earlier Copernicus and then Galileo changed how science viewed man’s place in the universe. Prior to Copernicus and Galileo, the earth was seen as the center of the universe, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars all orbiting around the earth. Once Copernicus showed that the earth and the solar planets rotated around the sun and especially after Galileo with his telescope showed that Jupiter also had orbiting moons, our understanding of earth’s relationship to the greater universe was transformed.

  It was no different when Darwin clarified our ascent from prehuman, even premammalian, ancestors. After he published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, the relationship of Homo sapiens to the rest of animal life on earth was likewise transformed.

  However, Darwin did not just document the relationship of our physical forms to the physical forms of other animals. Darwin devoted his entire third book to emotions, namely, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) in which he evolutionarily linked human emotions to those of other mammals. In the process, of establishing the relationship of human emotions to the emotions of other mammals, he offered powerful testimony to how central emotions are to human lives.

  In Expression, as Darwin outlined an evolutionary approach to thinking about human behavior and emotion, he did not simply invent his ideas. He based his thinking about emotions on data—carefully collected observational evidence (of the ethological as opposed to experimental variety)—just like he had done more quantitatively with the beaks of birds and other physical characteristics. For Darwin, evolutionary thinking did not involve imagining the challenges faced by our Stone Age human ancestors and extrapolating insights about human nature. For Darwin, evolutionary thinking consisted of examining and comparing the actions of many very distantly related ancestors, such as chimpanzees, monkeys, dogs, cats, and farm animals. When this comparative approached revealed a consistent pattern of behavior and emotion across multiple mammalian species, Darwin was convinced he had not deceived himself about the evolutionary importance of homologous (having a corresponding origin, function, and structure) inherited characteristics.

  Thus, Darwin was the first to scientifically document the primary emotions shared by all mammals, including humans. Resonant with
these Darwinian insights, and as we discuss in previous and following chapters, drawing a closer relationship between primal emotions and personality is one of the contributions of a cross-species affective neuroscience—a main theme of this book that allows us to begin putting human personality on a sound evolutionary foundation.

  Darwin forever erased the great divide between humans and nonhumans. He used the power of his comparative observations to challenge the view of human life widely held at the time—driven by 2,500-year-old philosophical and theological assumptions—that only humans were sentient beings (indeed, at times rational), whereas the lives of other animals were governed only by mindless behavioral instincts (Beach, 1955). Darwin recognized that such emotional instincts also govern our own lives and that they are not simply unconscious behaviors, as some twentieth-century scientists continued to believe. Neuroscience has now definitively located the foundation of these instinctual emotions, and associated feelings, within diverse subcortical brain networks. The existence of positive and negative feelings is monitored by the explicit rewarding and punishing states engendered by direct brain stimulation (DBS) of various subcortical emotional circuits (Panksepp, 1982, 1998a, 2005). Research has consistently shown that organisms approach (work for) DBS that evokes SEEKING, LUST, CARE, and PLAY. They escape DBS that evokes RAGE/Anger, FEAR, and PANIC/Sadness. These measures signify the existence of emotional feelings in animal brains.

  Clearly the lack of the neocortex at birth in humans does not destroy consciousness, only our capacity for language, complex perceptions, and thoughts—the complexity of our cognitions (Merker, 2007). The basic emotional life survives. And now we know, and Darwin did not, that if we massively destroy emotional circuits of the subcortical brain regions, the higher mind also collapses (Panksepp, 1998a, 2007a). The simple lesson for human personality studies is that we are not wise to neglect the brain’s instinctual emotional systems as a critical aspect of the diversity of human personalities. However, some psychological groups, namely, cognitive behaviorists, do not accept that the key to unlocking human personality lies in first unlocking the affective mysteries in the old midline brain structures of our mammalian ancestors, only partly because that would also entail accepting that other mammals affectively experience their bodies and worlds much as humans do. That is not welcome news in some academic quarters.