In short, McDougall took important conceptual steps in fleshing out an evolutionarily grounded theory of personality, although he was not able to put those ideas on a firm neuroscience foundation, which would have required cross-species brain research of the kind now common in modern animal and human affective neurosciences. He was not willing to attribute any instinctual emotion to humans that could not also be observed behaviorally in other animals. He also only considered emotions that in their extreme expression became pathological. He allowed for adaptation and the learning of new stimuli and new responses to be associated with the core affects, which did not change with experience and which needed to be directly experienced to be subjectively understood. Indeed, without the tools of modern neuroscience, he came tantalizingly close to the affective neuroscience position on emotions and personality, but the neuroscience of his day was not mature enough to take it to the next essential step—demonstration of diverse rewarding and punishing emotional brain systems in other animals, which Panksepp’s (1981b, 1982, 1998a) work has solidified. Of course, there is abundant neuroempirical work left to be done, especially at the cognitive levels, because with its massive cortical expansions (relative to body size), the human brain may be the most complex object in our known universe.
A BRIEF COMPARISON OF MCDOUGALL’S AND PANKSEPP’S BASIC EMOTION APPROACHES
McDougall’s terms for his list of eleven primary instincts (with alternate language in parentheses) were flight (FEAR), repulsion (disgust), curiosity (SEEKING), pugnacity (RAGE/Anger), self-abasement (submissiveness), self-assertion (dominance), the parental instinct (CARE), reproduction (LUST), the gregarious instinct (PANIC/Sadness), the instinct of acquisition, and the instinct of construction.
Here we briefly consider how McDougall’s views on those emotions overlap with Darwin’s and Panksepp’s. But first, it should be noted that there are many other psychologically-oriented emotion theorists (most prominently, Ross Buck, Paul Ekman, Cal Izard, Robert Plutchick, and especially Silvan Tomkins) whose psychological and facial analyses we do not cover here, for they did not contribute to the cross-species neural understanding of primary-process emotions. There is also an enormous number of fine young investigators using modern brain imaging, especially fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) of brain blood oxygen levels as a proxy for neural firing. We will not cover brain imaging in this chapter (but see Chapter 16 on brain imaging), because their work does not yet directly impact our cross-species brain network understanding of primal emotions that guided the development of our Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS).
To facilitate this overview, Table 4.1 compares Darwin’s, McDougall’s, Panksepp’s, and the Big Five list of primary emotions and traits. There is a solid core of similarities, with a variety of more debatable items used by McDougall, such as “disgust,” which is included by most modern human emotion theorists (for recent overview, see Tracy & Randles, 2011), but Panksepp withholds judgment, seeing it as a metaphoric usage describing social disdain in terms of a sensory bodily feeling of nausea. Hence, disgust would be a secondary or tertiary emotion rather than a primary one (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of primary, secondary, and tertiary conceptual levels of emotions).
Flight and the Emotion of Fear
The instinct of flight, accompanied by the emotional feeling of fear, was McDougall’s first instinct. While this instinct begins with flight or fleeing from danger, McDougall argued that flight was often followed by “concealment.” He also allowed for concealment, or what we would now call freezing or hiding, to be the initial fear response and described people who irrationally sought cover from strange noises at night by covering their heads with their blankets.
Table 4.1. Emotion Systems: Three Comparative Approaches and the Big Five
Darwin: Emotions McDougall: Primary Instincts/Emotions Panksepp: Primary Emotions Big Five:
Personality Traits
Surprise, Astonishment, Fear, and Terror Flight/Fear FEAR Low Emotional Stability
Disdain, Contempt, Disgust, Guilt, Pride Repulsion/Disgust (likely a sensory affect, not an emotional system) —
Anticipatory vs. Consummatory Enjoyment Curiosity/Wonder SEEKING/Enthusiasm Openness to Experience
Hatred, Rage, and Anger Pugnacity/Anger RAGE/Anger Low Emotional Stability
— Self-assertion/Elation and Self-abasement/Subjection (Social Dominance not well defined as a distinct brain circuit ) Possible aspect of Extraversion
Love, Tender Feelings Parental Instinct/The Tender Emotion CARE High Agreeableness
— Reproduction LUST —
Suffering, Weeping, Grief The Gregarious Instinct PANIC/Sadness Low Emotional Stability
— Acquisition (such behaviors may arise largely from SEEKING) —
— Construction — —
Joy, High Spirits Innate Play Tendency PLAY Extraversion
McDougall noted that fear brought all other activities to an end. In other words, fear stopped all ongoing positive instinctual behaviors. He described the fear emotion as the “great inhibitor of action,” and the “great agent of social discipline” in primitive human societies, although it is still easy today to find examples of leaders utilizing fear to control their populations. With the emotion of fear, McDougall’s system fits well with Panksepp’s modern affective neuroscience blue ribbon emotions, in this case the FEAR system.
Pugnacity and the Emotion of Anger
McDougall also selected pugnacity as a primary instinct and named the emotion anger. On the sensory input side, he suggested that “opposition to the free exercise of any impulse” (p. 51) elicited this instinct. The goal of this instinct was to break down the obstruction and even “destroy whatever offers opposition” (p. 51).
McDougall suggested that “irritation” described human feelings of milder pugnacity, as when one’s meal is interrupted. However, he suggested that “furious” was more appropriate when one’s sex life is interfered with. McDougall also suggested that one of the main functions of anger in humans is to provide an extra surge of energy when facing something blocking one’s path, and in this sense anger became an enabler, in contrast to fear the inhibitor. With the pugnacity instinct and the emotion of anger, McDougall rather accurately described the RAGE/Anger system. So, he started out two for two in a general comparison with Panksepp’s blue ribbon list.
Repulsion and the Emotion of Disgust
The only other instinct McDougall offered in the negative affect mix was “repulsion” and the emotion of “disgust.” He described repulsion as an “aversion” that prompts one to “remove or reject the offending object” (p. 48). He included “creepy shudder” to slimy things with the repulsion instinct, as well as spitting something “evil-tasting” out of one’s mouth.
McDougall suggested that the facial expression of disgust was similar to the facial movements made when rejecting something from the mouth, and it is this widely recognized expression that convinces many that disgust is instinctive and should be included in taxonomies of emotion (e.g., Toronchuk & Ellis, 2007). However, disgust may be better thought of as a sensory affective reaction that happens to be associated with a facial expression, rather than a primary, whole-body emotion response.
In contrast to the other negative affects of RAGE/Anger, FEAR, and PANIC/Sadness, it is more difficult to detect disgust just by the tone of someone’s speaking voice (Adolphs, 2002), although the related concept of scorn is easier to express. This and the lack of brain evidence for a well-defined emotional disgust brain system (although the nausea response depends heavily on the ancient cortical area known as the insula) led Panksepp to suggest that disgust should be considered a simpler sensory and/or possibly a homeostatic affect rather than among the blue ribbon list of primary-process integrative emotions that are more important for manifest personality differences among individuals.
Disgust, along with the sensory reaction of surprise and the feelings of tiredness, illness, hunger, and thirst, is an exa
mple of an affect that does not seem to have much influence on personality. In fact, these are not words that people tend to list as basic emotions (Russell, 1991), although they are sometimes included in lists of mood adjectives (Watson & Tellegen, 1985). So, while repulsion and disgust probably have instinctive components, they are not as clearly important for understanding the diversity of personality traits.
Curiosity and the Emotion of Wonder
Curiosity is the first positive instinct McDougall presented, and he labeled the affect wonder, a word he admitted might not fit perfectly but was the most appropriate he could find. (Recall his fourth principle that language could not adequately describe affects.) He contrasted the approach impulse of curiosity with the avoidance impulse of fear and discussed how the two may alternate as when curiosity compels one to start exploring a dark cave or unlit castle, which may quickly turn to fear if the strangeness or unfamiliarity of the situation becomes too great.
McDougall stated that curiosity was one of the weaker instincts. Hence, he did not see the curiosity instinct as having a general role comparable to that of Panksepp’s SEEKING system for driving us enthusiastically to explore the world and heading toward goals that meet our needs. He also did not link cocaine use, which became popular in his day (indeed, Freud had written a famous paper on his experiences), to the curiosity instinct. The closest he came to offering a pathological side to curiosity was to suggest it was unlikely that any organism could exhibit too strong a curiosity instinct without meeting “an untimely end”—as the old saying goes, curiosity killed the cat.
The Parental Instinct and the Tender Emotion
McDougall found another positive affect that he called the parental instinct, engendering a tender emotion. He contrasted reproduction in the “lower animals,” such as reptiles, which produce an immense number of eggs and leave their young unprotected, with that of the “higher animals” (meaning mammals), which produce far fewer eggs and display prolonged parental support and guardianship.
For McDougall, the parental instinct could be more powerful than any of the other instincts and could override any of them including fear, as he noted in those mothers “which in all other situations are very timid, any attempt to remove the young from the protective parent, or in any way to hurt them, provokes a fierce and desperate display of all their combative resource” (p. 62). While the parental instinct is usually stronger in women, he noted that “the parental instinct is by no means altogether lacking in men” (p. 59). As a student, McDougall had spent time in Indonesia on an anthropological expedition and reported watching a father in Borneo “spending a day at home tenderly nursing his infant in his arms” (p. 59).
In humans, the tender emotion is evoked by the helplessness of children, and it is the child’s cry of distress that primarily provokes the tender emotion. Although the parental instinct may be aroused more intensely by one’s own child, it can also be aroused by the cry of any child. McDougall noted that if those individuals with strong parental instincts cannot respond to their parental impulse, “they cannot withdraw their attention from the sound, but continue to listen in painful agitation” (p. 63).
McDougall seems to have captured the evolutionary basis of the parental instinct, as well as its possible elaboration in other aspects of life. Thus, he clearly described a system that is easily equated with the primary CARE system of modern affective neuroscience, which is a hormonally primed, female-typical variant of mammalian brain emotional circuitry.
The Gregarious Instinct
One of McDougall’s minor instincts was the gregarious instinct. While he stated that this instinct is “of greatest social importance,” he also wrote that its feeling component was so weak and unspecific that he did not give it a name. He may have gotten his ideas about gregariousness from the British statistician and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), who was Charles Darwin’s half cousin. McDougall referred to Galton’s classic description of the South African ox in Damaraland. Galton had traveled to what is currently Namibia and in 1871 published his observations in Inquiries into Human Faculty. McDougall quoted him: “[The ox] displays no affection for his fellows, and hardly seems to notice their existence, so long as he is among them; but, if he becomes separated from the herd, he displays an extreme distress that will not let him rest until he succeeds in rejoining it” (p. 72). From this, McDougall argued that the gregarious instinct is simply “uneasiness in isolation” and “satisfaction in being one of the herd” (p. 72). However, McDougall was looking through the wrong end of the telescope and missed the significance of “separation distress.” Had he never sat up all night in the kitchen trying to sooth a distressed puppy or a young child?
It seems apparent that what McDougall called the gregarious instinct was the flip side of separation distress and the PANIC/Sadness system. While he was typically an excellent observer of behavior, he never mentioned any vocalization as part of separation distress. He also made no mention of the crying exhibited by so many young animals when separated from their mates or caregivers.
So, in our view, McDougall’s gregarious instinct was not about gregariousness—it was about the primary PANIC/Sadness system and the painful separation distress we feel when we lose an important social connection. If McDougall had focused on the expression of separation distress rather than its absence, he would have scored another direct hit one hundred years ago. Psychological/behavioral progress on that topic started when psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907–1990) conceptualized the emotional importance of human relationships and Harry Harlow (1905–1981) and John Paul Scott (1909–2000) concurrently started to study social attachment processes and separation distress, especially through separation-induced crying. Panksepp was the first to initiate neurobiological manipulation of this PANIC brain system.
Sympathy, Suggestibility, Imitation, and Play
McDougall added four additional innate tendencies that he stopped short of calling instincts. He argued that sympathy, suggestibility, and imitation do not have specific perceptual triggers or well-defined responses: “There is no common affective state and no common impulse seeking satisfaction in some particular change of state” (p. 88). So, he preferred to call them “pseudo-instincts.” McDougall finally came to the “tendency to play,” but like sympathy, suggestibility, and imitation, he stopped short of calling it an instinct and described it instead as one of “the native tendencies of the mind.” However, he did acknowledge that humans and many animals start playing “spontaneously without any teaching or example” (p. 92).
McDougall reviewed and rejected several other theories of play, including G. Stanley Hall’s (1904) law of recapitulation, which claimed that play represented the cultural stages humans had traversed in their evolutionary past. For example, climbing trees represented the human “monkey” period, and camping represented our “nomadic” period.
McDougall offered some interesting observations about play on his own. He noted that if play fighting was just the immature expression of the pugnacious instinct, then animals should be angry and really trying to hurt each other, but he observed that young dogs do not exhibit anger as they “roll about together” even though they show anger in other situations. He noted puppies have sharp teeth and are capable of biting hard, but when they play they do not bite each other hard enough to draw blood. McDougall also commented that “boys are no exception to the rule” of combat without anger (p. 94).
McDougall accurately described the stereotyped running and chasing play in puppies and young children. However, PLAY, as the most recently evolved mammalian emotion, seemed too complex, especially in humans. Yet, Panksepp’s seminal work with the PLAY system in rats, from development of rigorous experimental paradigms to the first neuroscience inquiries (Panksepp, Siviy, & Normansell, 1984), has led to the experimental study of play becoming an increasingly important topic of rigorous inquiry (e.g., Panksepp et al., 2015; Pellis & Pellis, 2016).
CONCEPTUAL EXCESSES VERSUS EXPERIMENTAL RIGOR
A flaw that appeared in McDougall’s theory was perhaps not being content with the behavioral explanations of his eleven instincts and innate tendencies. To explain more behavior, he proposed two additional constructs: sentiments and complex emotions. A sentiment was “an organised system of emotional tendencies centered about some object” (p. 105). Love and hate for another person (the object) were two such sentiments. For example, love was a sentiment rather than a primary emotion because when a person came to “love” someone, that person became likely to experience any of a collection of emotions that somehow became encapsulated in the love sentiment. That is, when a person loves another, that person will experience caring in the presence of the loved one but also fear when the loved one is in danger, anger when the loved one is threatened, sadness when separated, joy with reunion, and so forth, depending on the situation.
Complex emotions were different than sentiments in that they arose from the simultaneous arousal of two or more emotions. One of the complex emotions McDougall offered was admiration, which blended the emotions of wonder and submission. Wonder was evident in the behavioral impulse to approach, and submission in the tendency to be humbled and perhaps childlike. However, if admiration were further blended with fear, the resulting complex emotion was awe. Further examples were scorn, a combination of anger and disgust; loathing, a combination of fear and disgust; and fascination, which added an element of approach to loathing by combining loathing with wonder. Obviously, such higher emotional constructs are next to impossible to study in animals.
The Emotional Foundations of Personality Page 9