The Emotional Foundations of Personality

by Kenneth L Davis

  With respect to personality, the ANPS is the first human psychological inventory that has arisen directly from our understanding of primal emotional processes in animal brains. We suspect that some future version of the DSM will focus on such brain systems as the very foundation of understanding the diverse psychiatrically significant affective traits that need to be carefully monitored (and modeled) to have better understandings (and treatments) of human affective disorders. Also, new psychological measurement tools that respect these foundations of normal and psychologically disordered human personality development need to be constructed. (For further discussion of these topics, see the next chapter).

  CHAPTER 19

  Fleshing Out the Complexities

  Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, . . . is the mark of mentality. In its most primitive forms it is the forerunner of the phenomena that constitute the subject matter of psychology. Organic activity is not psychological unless it terminates, however remotely or indirectly, in something felt. . . .

  The thesis I hope to substantiate here is that the entire psychological field—including conception, responsible action, rationality, knowledge—is a vast and branching development of feeling.

  —Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling

  HUMANS ARE A PROFOUNDLY affective species. Our affects constitute a language of their own, not a verbal, orally spoken language but a nonverbal, felt language. It is perhaps the oldest language of consciousness, the original source of vital information that we experience as a part of living. Raw affective experiences are “the ancestral voices of the genes,” to use Ross Buck’s felicitous phrase, that speak to us directly as we experience life with its various levels of survival encounters and positive and negative life choices. Some of our emotional affects alert us to the possible loss of resources (RAGE/Anger), the loss of our social connections (PANIC/Sadness), and various dangers to life and limb (FEAR), thus teaching us what sorts of things to avoid, because they feel “bad,” or aversive. On the positive feel “good” side, our emotional affects also make us aware of opportunities to harvest and hunt for resources and to pursue safety and other life-sustaining outcomes (SEEKING), namely, energized psychobehavioral activities devoted to opportunities to get all resources needed for survival. Our positive emotional affects also move us to tenderly help significant others, especially babies (CARE), and affectively excite us to physically interact and engage socially with others just for the fun of it (PLAY), thus teaching us how to live best with others. Included in the overall mix of basic emotions after puberty, although perhaps less closely related to personality, maturing animals and humans experience positive exciting arousals associated with identifying and becoming more intimate with potential mating partners (LUST). Many of these emotions relate directly to the nature of social bonding, which is essential for the formation of families and mutually supportive working communities.

  In short, our primal emotions along with their powerful affects continuously guide our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. In addition to the emotional affects, there are also various sensory affects, for example, tastes and touches, but also feelings of disgust that compel us to spit out nasty things and possibly smack slimy, creepy things off our skin. Plus, there are homeostatic affects that inform us about our internal bodily states—survival needs such as food (HUNGER), water (THIRST), warmth (or cool shade), rest (tiredness), and sleep (sleepiness). However, it is the emotional affects that are largely responsible for guiding our moment-by-moment choices as we maneuver through the dynamic complexities of our worlds.

  The primary-process manifestations of such affective states are instinctual—inherited tools for living that often remain inadequately addressed by those who study animal brains and behaviors to understand our intrinsic survival-value systems. For such research, affects cannot be seen directly but have to be inferred from behaviors. Of course with humans we can make judgments based on what subjects say and do.

  In either case, it is a marvel to observe the coordinated interactions of new mammalian infants and parents as they learn to coordinate and navigate in their new social world. These interactions are very different in ungulates, such as sheep and horses, which are born ready to run and bond with their mother, compared with other mammals, such as dogs and humans, who are born very immature and require longer periods of maternal care. Ungulate infants and mothers bond rapidly, as indicated by prompt distress calls if they become separated, while other mammals take much longer to show such responses. But in both precocious (born quite mature) and altricial (born very immature) species, these separation distress calls help inform parents that their infants are distressed and activate parent-infant reunion behaviors and emotions.

  Importantly, all primary-process emotions are also learning systems, such that each time an emotion’s powerful rewarding or punishing affects are aroused, the associated behaviors are rewarded or punished according to the valence of the emotional affects experienced, a process that can take place without conscious awareness—namely, valenced experiential states without cognitive correlates. Also remember that in classical learning theory, the termination of a punishment, such as a foot shock, can serve as a reward—ambiguously called “negative reinforcement,” which does not mean something positive happened, simply a response that avoids negative outcomes. But clearly a sophisticated psychology requires more realistic affective concepts than that. Let us consider real-life situations more common than the termination of electric shock.

  For instance, it seems likely that, after an infant’s perceived separation, reunion with the parent, accompanied by renewed physical contact, creates a two-edged learning event: learning to avoid painful social separation and learning the soothing contact comfort of physical reunion. Much has been written about parent-infant bonding, and many researchers believe that when an infant learns that he or she can rely on the parent returning, a secure social bond is created, with the infant gradually learning to tolerate longer periods of separation and independent activity (Ainsworth, 1969; Ainsworth & Bell, 1970). However, the potent positive affect of social reunion should not be called “negative reinforcement” unless one refuses to conclude, as many behaviorists did, that their shocked animals actually experience something like relief when shock is terminated.

  An instinctive emotional foundation does not make humans and other mammals mechanical robots, but treats them as active agents engaging and adapting to their worlds. Importantly, all primary-process emotional action systems are also learning systems allows creatures—human and nonhuman alike—to extend their genetically endowed instinctive responses and adapt to novel environments that their inborn, evolved capacities did not specifically anticipate. This phenomenon of emotional action systems, promoting and “encapsulating” learning in memories, extends beyond mammals, even to invertebrates such as crayfish that form place attachments to locations where they have received opioids (Huber et al., 2011) and perhaps even to fruit flies (Gibson et al., 2015).

  THE THREE-LEVEL NESTED BRAINMIND HIERARCHY REVISITED

  The complexity that emerges from our primary-process emotional action systems, with their powerful affects, has been conceptualized in what we call the three-level Nested BrainMind Hierarchy (NBH; see Chapter 5), starting with the expression of primary emotions, which leads to secondary learning as we interact with life events and experience the primary emotions with their rewarding or punishing valenced affects, which in turn (especially in humans) results in tertiary cognitive processes of reflecting and ruminating (thinking) about past outcomes and future possibilities.

  A single primary-process emotional affect in its pure form—that is, by itself and not experienced in combination with another primary affect, a condition that may not often exist in nature—can be thought of as a kind of affective least common denominator. Each primary emotional affect can be experienced at various levels of intensity. Each is a reward or punishment with its own distinct, initially intrinsic nat
ure, or qualia, which cannot be adequately described in language or understood by anyone who has not experienced it—such as McDougall’s example of trying to explain to a person who has been blind since birth what the color red looks like. In addition, each emotional affect creates its effect on learning without requiring anything else in addition to itself. Each emotional affect, as part of an emotion, is also accompanied by altered thoughts and perceptions, as well as an activity or an urge to act that is consistent with its primary emotion. In short, each emotional affect is a unique qualia that requires nothing else in order to actuate its motivational effect as well as the experience of the affect itself.

  These emotional primes provide a good basic tool kit with which to start life but would yield a rather simple creature if it were not for the “Law of Affect,” (Panksepp & Biven, 2012, p. 58), that is, their effects on learning and memory formation, and consequent adaptability and survivability. While evolution endows its creatures with a set of crucial survival skills, it is the rewarding or punishing impact of the affects (some of them packaged as the primary emotions where raw affect and instinctual behaviors go together in the brain) that allows each sentient being the capacity to adopt novel responses to life challenges and to adapt to environments and cultures that Mother Nature did not foresee.

  Affective learning proceeds automatically, and this secondary-process learning can proceed unconsciously and does not require awareness (which requires higher conscious reflections). While this secondary conditioning allows us, for example, to acquire many new fears, the element in the affective equation that theoretically does not change qualitatively is the feeling of FEAR itself. Still, successful learning (e.g., “negative reinforcement,” in behaviorist parlance) can help attenuate and regulate such aversive states of mind. As illustrated in the three-level NBH (see Figure 5.1), at its core each newly acquired fear remains rooted in the primary emotion from which it was derived (e.g., in the present example FEAR). While the intensity and duration of the aroused affect may vary as a function of learning, the foundational affect itself does not qualitatively change, but the psychological end result in the present case is “relief,” not the artificial terminology of “negative reinforcement” created by behaviorists, seemingly throwing away the mind in the behaviorist bathwater.

  It remains a mystery when self-awareness first appeared in evolutionary history: perhaps only in the highest “branches” of the evolutionary bush, such as higher primates, with animals sufficiently endowed with the tertiary-level cognitive processes subsumed by the highest level of the NBH. At such tertiary levels of processing, cognitive awareness allows for thinking about and reflecting on one’s emotional experiences as a kind of third-party observer. At least in humans, our highly developed cerebral cortex, as well as spoken language, adds further complexity to our emotional experiences, with the emergence of cognitively derived or promoted emotional affects, such as jealousy, guilt, and shame, along with additional verbal labels perhaps describing shades of emotional affects, all of which lead us into the largely unchartered waters of a tertiary-level neuroscience, that modern human brain imaging is attempting to explore (Takahashi et al., 2004; Michl et al., 2014).

  At the tertiary level, while primary-process emotions continue to provide the foundation for emotional experience, one can no longer say that emotions and affects at cortical levels remain primary in the strictest sense: They are occurring only in the present moment and sufficient by themselves, because they likely also depend on “re-represented” thoughts and perceptions that can be kindled and rekindled over time with, for example, RAGE/Anger potentially emerging as an ongoing cold “hate” and SEEKING appearing as a perpetually harbored “wonderful” or “inappropriate” desire. At this tertiary, cognitive, and (for humans) verbal level there is the possibility for exceeding complexity, as well as many opportunities for personal confusions (plus misunderstandings across individuals as well as cultures). For example, it can be challenging to know when one is truly in love or how best to respond when such social bonds are threatened or broken. This is where the arts and humanities may be more successful than the sciences.

  It is our position that emotional events at the more abstract, tertiary level remain firmly grounded in the basic mammalian emotional action systems. We believe that all personal values are rooted in experiences with the positive or negative affects, which include, at the very least, sensory, homeostatic, and emotional affects. Further, it is likely that all thoughts include affective elements. Humans are profoundly affective creatures, with affective features likely integrated with all aspects of our lives and our most moving arts.

  So, on the face of it, what starts as an instinctive repertoire of ancestral survival skills at the primary-process level, through learning becomes expanded into a system of adapted behavior limited only by the capacities of the individual, all culminating in affective-cognitive subtleties elaborated uniquely, to some extent, in human minds.

  The Emotional PLAY System Conceptualized Within the NBH

  The emotional PLAY system is one of the brain’s blue ribbon primary emotional action systems. It is has been observed in practically all mammals studied, with few exceptions (e.g., it may have been bred out of some strains of laboratory mice), yet it has been difficult to document in nonmammalian species. The PLAY system is most frequently studied at the primary-process level and is typically expressed in young mammals as chasing and wrestling accompanied by distinctive vocalizations. In human children these vocalizations can take the form of ear-piercing shrieks of delight. In rodents, play vocalizations are necessarily ultrasonic (not audible to humans) to avoid detection by predators. In addition to the back-and-forth chasing seen, for example, in human children and juvenile dogs, play in young mammals also frequently takes the form of a kind of rough-and-tumble wrestling, which can appear like fighting to human observers but which is a positively energized experience for the young participants. One characteristic of these play tussles is that if one participant begins to win more than 70 percent of the time, the losing partner will diminish playing with that partner, suggesting that both participants need to experience the positive affect of “ending up on top” around half the time in order to sustain play motivation. Stuart Brown has provided a dramatic example of this PLAY system principle of a wild polar bear playing with a chained sled dog: with the polar bear lying on its back, allowing the sled dog to chew on its neck as if it were winning the play bout (Brown & Vaughan, 2009). His TED talk, including pictures, can be found at “https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital”.

  However, human children, especially boys when given the opportunity, will begin to spontaneously organize pickup team games as a form of play that entails an order of magnitude greater complexity than the more elementary rough-and-tumble play. Team sports have not been observed in other species and require a level of cognitive abstraction in the form of rules of play that need to be accepted and followed by all players. As such, we can conceptualize playing baseball as an example of a tertiary-level PLAY activity. Yet, it is likely no coincidence that three primary PLAY system components, (1) running, (2) occasional physical contact, and (3) near to a 50 percent chance of winning, are “nested” even in such involved games with the explicit rules that humans are more expert at than any other species. Thus, even at this tertiary play level, in these afterschool games, usually of children’s own devising, it remains important to develop methods to divide the players as equally as possible, often according to skill level, in order to maintain the plausibility that either team could win.

  Without such a feeling of quid pro quo, play has difficulty getting energized, which reflects the anticipatory enthusiasm of the SEEKING system. In our personal experiences, that usually meant the two best players became informal captains of opposing teams who then alternated selection of team members to assure that a clique of more skilled players did not always play on the same team and dominate the play activities, for example
, in baseball by making fewer outs, enabling them to stay up at bat for extended periods. Thus, both teams retain the potential of winning, which nests this primary PLAY-SEEKING principle into the tertiary PLAY experience. Variations of such honest means of dividing players into well-matched teams seem to work equally well for afterschool basketball or football games in the United States. Of course when it comes to formal team sports in high school and college, those courtesies are dispensed with, and it becomes much more of a cultural power game. Such social reflections of “my team” often lead to outright aggression among groups.

  A tertiary quality to these pickup baseball games of middle youth is their being governed by rules, which the children often devise themselves to accommodate special local circumstances. For example, children might need to define boundaries often on marginal play sites that are not set up to define foul ball areas. As another example, when smaller children are included, they might be given easier pitches to give them better chances of hitting the ball and keeping them motivated to play. Such participant-defined and participant-enforced rules seem to go beyond anything observed in nonhuman play and adapt the rules of what is already a comparatively complex sport to specific circumstances. Handball or “stick ball” played in the streets and alleys of many megacities (e.g., NYC) provide similar tertiary adaptations for “make-shift” available circumstances.