Indeed, there is overwhelming objective scientific evidence that various basic emotions are fundamental powers of the BrainMind, in both humans and other animals, and we would suggest they are of critical importance for understanding the foundations of human temperament. Cross-species affective neuroscience has the potential for scientifically mapping out the continuity of the emotional BrainMind in subcortical-limbic circuits of all vertebrate brains, as it already has for understanding various psychiatric disorders (Panksepp, 2005, 2015, 2016). We suspect that when we structure our human temperamental measures in terms of primary-process emotional issues, many of the higher aspects of personality may become easier to analyze. However, in seeking a comprehensive story, we should not forget that the higher regions of the brain are more plastic than the lower regions, and that there are environmentally relevant susceptibility factors that are not yet well understood, perhaps the most subtle of all being that the degree of environmentally induced plasticity may itself be heritable (i.e., epigenetics, discussed in Chapter 15). Clearly, such issues will never be well understood in humans unless we have corresponding animal models to study the underlying neurobiological details. We will understand our own fundamental (evolved) emotional systems and the feelings they generate largely through cross-species research, rather than just human research. This said, our neocortical expansions and capacity to speak allow us to have abundant thoughts that no other species has yet had. But little of that would exist without our grand ancestral voices and evolved primary-process affective heritage.
To summarize, working backward from this chapter through the previous three chapters, we have identified ancient neurochemistries spanning a billion years of animal evolution that humans share with the nematode C. elegans and have explored evidence for mammalian emotional commonalities with fish—originating perhaps 600–400 million years ago—in the SEEKING, RAGE/Anger, and FEAR emotional action systems, with glimmers of even some commonalities in our CARE system neurochemistries. Further, these ancient neural “survival systems” are still retained in the mammalian emotional affective BrainMind makeup, along with fuller elaborations of various social emotions, especially CARE, PANIC/Grief/Sadness, and PLAY. Each of these emotional affective systems is an ancestral guide for living and learning and “speak” to us in the oldest of experienced languages: They feel like something. That is, these inborn affective qualia, originating from survival systems that evolutionarily precede verbal language and are so often difficult to describe in words, each has a positive or negative valence about them that informs us about our survival paths and probabilities. Pleasant affects like the joy of CARE in nurturing infants encourage us to maintain our evolutionary-survival trajectories. Unpleasant affects like FEAR tell us we may be in danger and urge us to stop or to run—to freeze or flee—while automatically teaching us to avoid such situations in the future (via yet poorly understood “Laws of Affect” that control learning and memory formation).
These raw subjective feelings are one of life’s great mysteries. No one yet knows precisely how subcortical brain networks generate such affective states of mind. We do know that they are experienced by many classes of animals, and most certainly all mammals, because they change how these animals, including humans, behave both in the moment and by altering life trajectories as they spontaneously result in learning. Animals learn to avoid the unpleasant affects and work for more of the pleasant affects. However, that these affects are experienced does not necessarily mean animals are consciously “aware” of them. They probably do not cognitively dwell on such states of mind as much as humans do, partly because of our capacity to think and speak. It is widely believed that brain cortex is required to generate conscious awareness of an affect as a kind of symbolic re-representation. Yet, as we study animals with more complex cortical development—as their cerebral cortex more closely approximates the human neocortex (especially the other anthropoid apes)—it becomes more likely that they do experience some kind of higher conscious awareness of their own affects. However, without being able to communicate with verbal language, it is difficult to know the level of any other species’ actual experience, although there are tantalizing hints in animals from jackdaws to chimpanzees of some level of cognitive awareness (Bekoff, 2007; de Waal, 2009; Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016).
In any case, the increased encephalization of the brain, as perhaps best seen in chimpanzees, allows for more nuanced behavior and feelings and social learning. The expansion of the neocortex seems to allow for greater emotional regulation, as seen in the conscientiousness of chimpanzees and brown capuchin monkeys, as well as increased social sophistication, as seen in the reports of chimpanzee political alliances and examples of moral behavior. Of course, the apex of neocortical development occurs in humans. However, it is our position that even the most complex refinements and subtleties of human behavior and principles rest on the foundational values for living inherited in the form of our ancient subcortical emotional affects and their ancestral voices that speak to us in the most primal language: the spontaneous affective language of what it feels like to be alive—to experience life.
CHAPTER 11
Preludes to the Big Five Personality Model
An Earlier Path To Understanding BrainMind States and Human Temperaments
Many philosophers, writers and psychologists have speculated about the basic forces or urges which impel man to respond to his environment. Some, notably McDougall, Freud, Murray, Maslow, Hull and more recently the ethologists Lorenz and Tinbergen, have argued for innate mechanisms such as drives, needs, tensions and instincts which are said to have enabled both animals and man to survive the hostilities of their surroundings. Others, like Watson and Skinner, have supposed that all patterns of motivation are acquired. . . .Whilst most of the foregoing proposals have some face validity, that is, a certain common-sense feel about them, there has been an alarming absence of appropriate experimental and analytical methods to substantiate the claims made. As they stand they scarcely belong to a mature science.
—Raymond B. Cattell and Dennis Child, Motivation and Dynamic Structure
AT THE END OF CHAPTER 10, we summarized our position on the Big Five personality model in relation to the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales. In this chapter, we aspire to share as readable a history as possible of the emergence of the Big Five in this important field of psychological science. Although the Big Five is claimed as the ultimate in empirical analysis of personality, as we have shown through many of the earlier chapters, the big flaw is that it is not adequately linked to the critical brain mechanisms of emotionality. The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales is the first test that is formally grounded on the fundamental nature of our primal mammalian emotions and motivations. We return to that theme in Chapter 12, but first we will describe the remarkable history of this area of psychological research and theorizing.
Prior to the statistical approaches leading eventually to the wide acceptance of the Big Five personality model, personality theory had moved forward on the basis of the intuitions of various theoreticians, all with distinct preferences, some perhaps with extreme biases. Could statistics provide the illumination to guide personality theory out of its apparent chaos toward mathematically defined clarity? Like a voice out of the wilderness, Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) capitalized on the optimistic faith that statistics, and factor analysis in particular, could provide the objectivity needed in this chaotic field. Yet, for us the main question is whether statistics by itself could achieve a deep understanding of our emotional nature and its links to the individual styles people use to approach the world—especially the social world.
Cattell was a native of England. He received his formal education at King’s College of the University of London before moving to the United States in 1937, where he rapidly moved up the ranks, from Columbia to Clark University and onward to Harvard, before being invited in 1945 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent most of his career. At
Urbana-Champaign his statistical and factor-analytic skills could be fully deployed because they had one of the first supercomputers of that era, the ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer), which was needed for the large-scale factor analyses that could mathematically sift relationships among many different measures of personality.
INTRODUCTION TO RAYMOND CATTELL’S WORK
In addition to his strong statistical background, Cattell was strongly influenced by both William McDougall and Sigmund Freud, both of whom he deeply admired (Kline, 1993, p. 90). However, he also considered them “prescientific” and “speculative”—scholars whose ideas would have benefited from solid scientific approaches. It was Cattell’s intention to replace earlier “observational” and “clinical” systems with “modern scientific procedures that can develop their own sets of results which can sort out of the confused mass of speculations, the dross from the gold” (Cattell & Kline, 1977, p. 7). Cattell felt that factor-analytic procedures could apply the necessary objectivity to both validate and fine-tune previous personality concepts. Later in his career he wrote that the work around dynamic (or, as he called them, ergic) trait structures “constitutes a quantitative development of psychoanalysis” (Cattell, 1986, p. 48).
Raymond Cattell brought an awesome intellect and energy to the task. His research and interests spanned the entire domain of psychology, from attitudes, interests, and the inheritance of personality to intelligence, which he considered part of personality. In sum, Cattell was one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. An analysis of work cited in textbooks and research articles, professional achievements, and surveys of other psychologist ranked him sixteenth behind such luminaries as B. F. Skinner (no. 1), Sigmund Freud (no. 3), and William James (no. 14) (Haggbloom et al., 2002). His prolific writing yielded a lifetime bibliography that included over five hundred articles, fifty books, and thirty standardized tests. Here, we focus on key elements of his work that have contributed to present personality thinking, especially the Big Five personality model.
Factor Analysis: A Prelude to the Big Five
During his long and luminary career, Cattell pioneered the use of factor analysis as a technique to identify the basic underlying dimensions that accounted for the full spectrum of human personality. He had faith that factor analysis could objectively reveal and define all the elements of personality, including both conscious and unconscious motivations. Therefore, he felt that factor analysis had the potential to validate theoretical approaches to personality such as those proposed by Freud and the psychoanalysts.
While at the University of London, he had been a student of Charles Spearman, who was the first to develop factor analysis (Spearman, 1904). Spearman had used factor analysis—an extension of statistical correlation—to study human intelligence and had demonstrated that there was an element of “general intelligence,” which he labeled “little g,” in all mental ability tasks regardless of their specific content. Cattell dreamed of expanding factor analysis from the exploration of cognitive problem-solving abilities into the domain of human personality.
The Need for Computers to Make Progress on Large Data Sets
What is factor analysis? Start with a confusing array of data, stir until correlated, mix in generous portions of calculus and matrix algebra, evaluate artfully until it seems done, and ideally you will have simplified your understanding of the data by identifying a few underlying “source” factors that explain most of the variation in the mass (or “mess”) of data you started with. This was Cattell’s ambitious goal for exploring personality, but he faced an enormous challenge. When he started out, all mathematical calculations had to be accomplished by hand, eventually aided by electromechanical calculators, before real programmable computers like the ILLIAC emerged at the middle of the twentieth century.
Actually, Cattell probably started with a few choice “computers,” in a manner of speaking, but they were the kind of computers Edwin Hubble, of expanding universe fame, had used when he worked with the first author’s old astronomy professor, Clifford Crump, at the Yerkes Observatory in Geneva, Wisconsin. In 1916, Hubble and Crump both had what they called computers: meaning mathematically inclined human assistants who performed all of the necessary mathematical calculations (Crump, personal communication). The very first “modern” computer ever built, by Charles Babbage (1791–1871), didn’t quite work because of mechanical, not conceptual, flaws in his “Analytical Engine” (see Snyder, 2011). It wasn’t till the end of World War II that the first real “giant brain,” named ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was completed, half a dozen years before the first commercial computer, UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951.
The chief technical limitation in those early days of factor analysis was having to do all the gruesome statistics with paper and pencil. The mathematical computations were so burdensome that many joked that any graduate student who could successfully complete the factor analysis computations in four years would automatically receive a Ph.D. In the 1930s, mechanical calculators were introduced that could multiply and divide, which lightened some of the computational load, but essentially all factor analyses were completed by hand until the development of digital computers. Supposedly, Cattell accepted his position at the University of Illinois in 1945 because the university was developing the ILLIAC, the first digital computer built and owned at any university, which would allow him to work with vastly larger data sets than could be managed by hand.
Of course, a lot of mathematical science had been accomplished before the advent of digital computers. There was Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hubble had demonstrated the existence of galaxies outside of our Milky Way and had provided critical evidence for the conclusion that the universe was still expanding. Even the Manhattan Project and the development of the first atomic bomb were developed using the calculations of a small army of the original human-type computers. However, the “primitive” automated computational methods of that era meant the first factor analyses of personality measures were rather limited in scope by today’s standards.
The First Glimpse of the “Big Five” in Personality Theory
Already early in his career, Cattell (1933) published an article on “temperament” traits that presaged the now widely accepted Big Five personality model. Correlating forty-six ratings on sixty-two college students, he statistically defined for the first time in a single study four factors that generally corresponded to the Big Five personality model:
Surgency, or sociable-gregarious versus unsociable-shy tendencies (Big Five: Extraversion)
Maturity, or a good-natured temperament versus maliciousness (Big Five: Agreeableness)
Personal “Will” or Conscientiousness versus unreliability (Big Five: Conscientiousness)
Well-adjusted versus Maladjusted (Big Five: Emotional Stability)
The only Big Five dimension missing was Openness to Experience. John Digman, in reviewing the history of the Big Five personality model, commented that these findings plus the Spearman “g” factor, as a measure of intellect, provided “the first glimpse of the Big Five” (1996, p. 3).
Factor-Analytic Studies Using Gordon Allport’s “Dictionary Terms”
Cattell was determined to establish the broadest possible personality description covering the complete “surface” of personality. It so happened that Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert (1936), also psychologists at Harvard, had previously extracted 17,953 dictionary terms that applied to human behavior. Of these, 4,504 terms, or about 1 percent of all the words in the dictionary, were considered personality traits. Cattell, with his characteristic energy and intensity, decided to capitalize on this massive effort and to reduce these trait terms to a list that seemed practical for a manually computed factor analysis.
In 1945 and 1947, while still at Harvard and later the University of Illinois with the ILLIAC computer, Cattell used 199 subjects rated on 171 trait terms to publish papers
describing twelve or thirteen personality traits extracted by factor-analytic techniques. But why didn’t Cattell stop at the four or five factors he had originally found and replicate his earlier correlational study? One of the answers lies in the nature of factor analysis itself, which is somewhat of an art form in the world of statistics. Two things factor analysis does not do are interpret the factors it produces and, perhaps most important, determine how many total factors may be embedded in the data. These two limitations are related, because the artful statistician determines how many factors to extract, which can be influenced by whether the investigator considers them interpretable.
Another answer comes from Louis Thurstone, of the University of Chicago, the most dominant player in the factor-analytic world at that time. He advocated extracting more rather than fewer factors. Thurstone felt that extracting “too many factors can do no harm” (1947, p. 509). So, Cattell routinely extracted too many factors by today’s standards and was encouraged to do so by Thurstone, the reigning factor-analytic expert of his day.
Digman, a prominent Big Five advocate, and his colleagues (Digman & Takemoto-Chock, 1981) have gone to the trouble of reanalyzing some of the data Cattell used to generate his twelve-factor solution. They concluded that Cattell would have been better advised to stop with five or six factors and that a five-factor solution would have provided a good match with current Big Five factors.
The Emotional Foundations of Personality Page 23