The Emotional Foundations of Personality

by Kenneth L Davis

  Another primary process characteristic of PLAY is that children and other young mammals actually need to play. Research has shown that animals deprived of play opportunities are more motivated to play and play more than nondeprived control subjects when finally given the opportunity (Panksepp, 1981c; Siviy & Panksepp, 1987), which would be no surprise to any teacher of young school children. As another feature of what is perhaps the most complex mammalian primary emotion, it is likely that social play actually contributes to the developmental maturation of frontal cortex brain regions (Siviy & Panksepp, 2011), areas frequently involved in planning and emotional regulation that may develop more slowly than other brain regions. Thus, the primary-process mammalian need to play may foster the maturation of cortical regions that typically contribute to the development of social skills and the maintenance of social cohesion, which may in turn enhance tertiary-level social play and strategizing as well.

  That children need to play has not been lost on Mike Lanza, a Menlo Park, California, parent of three boys who sensed that his children were not having the same spontaneous, unsupervised play experiences he benefitted from growing up in Pittsburgh. Mike and his wife turned their front and backyards into a childhood fantasy playground that inspired their entire “playborhood” (Thernstrom, 2016). Mike’s only rule was that if parents brought their kids over to play, the parents had to leave and participate in the kind of “benign neglect” that allowed children to play and work out their problems on their own. Needless to say, the Lanza yard, although controversial with some parents, became very popular with kids, who were allowed to play there whether the Lanzas were home or not.

  A related indication of the growing public awareness of the importance of play in children’s lives takes us to Finland. A Hechinger Report (Doyle, 2016) tells how students with ample opportunities to play consistently perform strongly on academic achievement tests. Among other well-rounded, designed school experiences, preschool teachers are required not only to give children as many as four outdoor free-play breaks each day but also to design play-based classroom learning experiences such as selling ice cream to fellow students. In an era in which even American kindergarteners are having instruction time replace play time, a Finnish preschool teacher is quoted in an article amusingly titled “The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland”: Children “learn so well through play. They don’t even realize that they are learning because they’re so interested” (Walker, 2015).

  While little academic research has been focused on access to free-play activities in schools, emerging research is providing evidence that elementary school teachers do rate children’s in-school performance higher if the children are allowed to participate in a preschool play sanctuary before each school day (Scott & Panksepp, 2003). There is also evidence that there may be a cultural price for limiting children’s play: the development of attention-deficit hyperactive disorder and consequent drug sensitivities created by overprescribing medications for the condition (Andersen, Arvanitogiannis, Pliakas, LeBlanc, & Carlezon, 2002). Further, we may be “improving children’s sustained attention at the expense of other vital cognitive functions,” such as important plasticity in the prefrontal cortex (Urban & Gao, 2013, p. 7). It may be that we ignore the mammalian need for childhood PLAY system activities at our own peril.

  Psychopathology

  William McDougall concluded that an important criterion for identifying a primary instinct would be whether in its extreme expression the behavior became pathological. Indeed, many psychopathologies are closely related to primary-process emotional action-affect systems. As we described in Chapter 18, depression and suicidal ideation were linked to the PANIC/Sadness system, with strong evidence that safe opioid medications such as buprenorphine could be an effective treatment. In addition to an overly sensitized PANIC/Sadness system contributing to major depression, we also described that depression might be the result of a functionally diminished (one might say sluggish) SEEKING system that no longer supported normal living, which could be successfully treated by deep brain stimulation to the medial forebrain bundle, reactivating mesolimbic dopamine circuits.

  Our view is that psychopathology is largely the result of emotions becoming imbalanced. As such, a main goal of therapy is to identify and label emotions that are imbalanced and explore them from a bottom-up perspective within a “therapeutic alliance,” that is, a caring, empathetic, and supportive relationship with a therapist (Shedler, 2010). However, one of the currently most popular psychotherapy modalities is cognitive therapy (CT), which uses a top-down approach aiming to help patients uncover and change distorted thoughts and perceptions that are theoretically causing psychological distress. A central tenet of CT is that life events generate thoughts that in turn give rise to emotions, and that creating more realistic cognitive beliefs will result in healthier, less distressing feelings. Of course, this approach is bound to produce benefits, especially if clients feel CAREed for by therapists whom they trust, again suggesting that a supportive affective alliance is essential in the best psychotherapeutic approaches.

  As mentioned in Chapter 18, a detailed analysis of actual CT therapist practices and patient outcomes has shown “that improvements can readily occur without changes in cognitions . . . [and] whatever may be the basis of changes with [cognitive therapy], it does not seem to be the cognitions as originally proposed” (Kazdin, 2007, p. 8). We concur and note that our primary-process emotional energies evolutionarily preceded human language and thought by well over 100 million years, perhaps much longer (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016). When these ancestral mental energies become disrupted, patients would likely benefit most from having them addressed more directly, with affective cushioning, rather than indirectly through cognitive maneuvers (for a fuller discussion, see Smith, 2017). We argue that therapists who are able to recognize the distinct affective dynamics of basic emotions are likely to be more helpful than therapists less skilled at working at the primary-process emotional level or those who intentionally and exclusively focus on the cognitive, tertiary level. Indeed, the bottom-up affective voices featured in this book, arising from ancient subcortical brain circuits, powerfully influence the whole cognitive domain, and therapists who remain alert to opportunities to recruit the often latent positive affective resources in their patients are likely to facilitate beneficial shifts in patient thinking as well.

  It is likely that primary affects are also important elements in the therapeutic use of memory reconsolidation. Every time a previously consolidated memory is retrieved, it enters a labile phase after which new elements concurrently being experienced can be incorporated into the original memory during an active process required to make the new memory stable again, namely, reconsolidation. One idea is that, in the context of a CAREing, empathetic, emotionally warm/supportive therapy session, especially after sharing a painful memory, the patient’s old original memory may incorporate elements from the accepting, supportive therapeutic experience during the reconsolidation of the old memory, thus softening the memory and making the reconsolidated memory less emotionally intrusive and hence more bearable. It isn’t that the old memory disappears, but in the context of a supportive therapeutic alliance in which the therapist resonates with the client’s psychological pain, the healing that takes place may involve tempering the original traumatic experience with “a warm therapeutic experience” through the process of memory reconsolidation. Any of the positive primary emotions, CARE, SEEKING, PLAY, and perhaps in special circumstances, even LUST, could be used to therapeutically reconsolidate painful memories.

  A therapeutic technique known as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR; Shapiro, 1989) provides another possible reconsolidation example. During an EMDR procedure, the patient recalls distressing images while receiving sensory input such as side-to-side eye movements. EMDR may work by activating a visually induced positive SEEKING exploratory urge that facilitates reconsolidation, that is, restructures the traumatic memory into a less debili
tating and more manageable psychic structure (Bisson et al., 2007).

  Thus, it seems that targeting primary affects in supportive therapies facilitate healing. For example, simply imagining the motor imagery of PLAYful laughter can be sufficient to significantly increase happy mood ratings (Panksepp & Gordon, 2003). However, dealing with affects more directly, perhaps merely capturing a mutually shared PLAYful, humorous experience during a therapy session, might be a surer step toward restructuring a difficult aversive memory.

  Any reader involved in a romantic relationship can try the following personal experiment. While having a spat with your romantic partner, try to look for an opportunity during which the two of you might touch each other and tenderly draw physically together. In this moment, notice how your thoughts change. You might find yourself reconsidering some of the things you said while you were arguing, which could lead to a gentler resolution of the quarrel. Likely, your partner will be having a similar experience. We would see this as an example of a bottom-up process in which a primary emotion and its distinctive affect—in this case perhaps even supportive romantic LUST—naturally guides positive thoughts and perceptions much better than trying to resolve the quarrel by focusing on a purely cognitive top-down process of adjusting distorted thoughts and perceptions. Good luck trying to convince your partner that his or her thoughts and ideas are the ones that are distorted, which is likely a recipe for more disasters.

  This little experiment could provide an example of how individuals themselves can learn to tap into their own psychic energies to help reframe personal thoughts and perceptions into new psychic structures that might be more adaptive. Indeed, we believe that everyone could benefit from becoming better educated about the emotional primes and how to recognize and deal with them, perhaps with the guidance of a supportive, affectively oriented therapist. One way to situate anyone in affective space is by using the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales, which addresses each of the primary emotions except LUST.

  SUMMARY

  It feels like something to be alive, to be awake and sentient. These feelings are raw affective states that are experienced subjectively as either desirable or undesirable, pleasant or unpleasant. They are age-old evolutionary survival tools, with the unpleasant affects informing us what to avoid and the pleasant ones what to approach. While there are sensory affects like disgust and homeostatic affects like hunger and thirst, it is the emotional affects that generally guide our major life choices. For humans and perhaps our more cerebrally gifted animal relatives, shifts in these emotional affective states change the color and tone of our cognitive experiences; they alter our perceptions, thoughts, and memories, in ways that have adaptively guided our actions for millennia.

  We are never far from these primary-level emotions, and as illustrated in the three-level Nested BrainMind Hierarchy (NBH) presented in Chapter 5 and discussed again in this chapter, our primary emotions are embedded in everything we do. They are also learning systems, which organize all of our positive and negative memories in a state-dependent manner that allows them to be accessible in similar situations in the future. We define this as the secondary-level process, which allows us to incorporate new experiences and refinements into our emotional action systems repertoire.

  However, humans are also highly cognitive creatures, and tertiary processing is more prevalent in our species than in any other. This is also the level of spoken language. However, as the NBH illustrates, the primary emotions are embedded at this level as well. Although humans attempt to describe their emotional experiences verbally, their feelings are qualia, which evolutionarily preceded spoken language by many millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of years. Thus, as psychoanalysts discovered early in the twentieth century, humans often have difficulty accurately expressing their emotional experiences in words.

  Even though we are highly cognitive creatures, is it possible that all our motivations are linked to ancestral affects? While there is no absolute answer yet, the SEEKING system clearly seems to be the most pervasive BrainMind motivator, and it is currently barely recognized in the psychological sciences. It is likely linked to all anticipatory goal seeking, with evidence that consumer-purchasing decisions can be reliably predicted by the activation of one of the major upper nodes of this system: the nucleus accumbens, an area incredibly rich in dopamine receptors (Knutson et al., 2007). It was the dopaminergic SEEKING system that Olds and Milner (1954) found, without fully realizing what they had discovered, which they later dubbed “the brain reward system,” although we now know there are several distinct reward systems in the mammalian brain. It is also no coincidence that cocaine, amphetamine and other dopaminergic drugs are highly addictive, because the SEEKING system is so closely linked to brain dopamine, and people love the feeling of heightened enthusiasm. From primary-level to tertiary-level processing, the SEEKING system probably provides a foundation for practically all of our drives and positive (and many negative) motivations.

  However, the PANIC/Sadness system also looms large in human social motivations and affective affairs. At the primary process level, opiates such as heroin, morphine, and oxycodone are also highly addictive. On the more strictly psychiatric end of the spectrum, it seems many children diagnosed with autism may be experiencing excessive surges of their internal (endogenous) opioids, which can markedly diminish their social motivation and concern for the perspectives of others. Also, a history of insecure social bonding is common in suicidal patients, a condition that, we have found, is effectively treatable with low-dose opioid drugs (Yovell et al., 2016). Indeed, at the tertiary-process level, broken relationships are a very prevalent theme in movies and songs.

  In addition, the FEAR system is involved in many psychiatric diagnoses, such as anxiety disorders and phobias. Benzodiazepines (e.g., Librium and Valium) are often used to treat anxiety disorders, which reflect, in part, overarousal of the FEAR System. Yet, because alcohol acts within the brain almost like a benzodiazepine, much social drinking may be a form of self-medication to reduce FEAR-induced psychological tension (i.e., anxiety) and thereby to promote relaxation and a feeling of well-being, which in too many cases can cascade into a prevalent form of alcoholism-like addiction.

  Although we humans are highly cognitive creatures, it is clear that we are not liberated from ancient emotional arousals. Indeed, many of our memories have emotional components, and many of our thoughts are emotionally tinged and triggered—to what extent remains a fascinating question yet to be answered. Ideally, more and more psychologically-oriented investigators of mind will pursue the many research challenges that are emerging from such understanding of the ancestral emotional forces that guide and govern human minds.

  In any event, it is becoming clear that our primary-process emotions provide solid foundations for the emergence and manifestations of our personalities. At their more extreme, imbalanced emotional processes account for many psychopathologies that afflict our species. The study of these shared emotional processes in animal models is providing a new and solid foundation for psychiatric/psychoanalytic thinking. From mania to depression, from phobias and fears to angry antisocial behaviors and related emotional imbalances, extreme, out-of-control emotions can gallop rough-shod over our cognitions, thereby disrupting not only our own lives but also those who are close to us. We designed the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of these emotional action systems and how their pervasive affects guide our lives. It is the first personality test based on a cross-species understanding of our affective heritage.

  On more individual levels, we may all benefit from becoming more aware of our individual emotional tendencies and their influences on our cognitive apparatus. In short, we all need better emotional education and may profit from becoming more aware of how our perceptions and thoughts are influenced in real time by our affective states. Learning to regulate and manage these emotional evolutionary foundations of personality can be a lifelong task leadi
ng to what Aristotle called phronesis—learning how to behave with emotional wisdom, and thereby better knowing who we are and what we want to become.

  Appendix: Scoring the ANPS 2.4

  The ANPS 2.4 was published in 2011 (Davis & Panksepp, 2011) and was a revision of the original ANPS published in 2003 (Davis, Panksepp & Normansell, 2003). The ANPS 2.4 revision aimed to increase some of the scale reliabilities. Future revisions can be expected as well.

  The ANPS 2.4 items are arranged in fourteen blocks using the following item sequence: SEEKING, FEAR, CARE, ANGER, PLAY, SADNESS, Spirituality (with only twelve items), followed by a filler research question. The items in the even blocks are reverse-scored. All items use a four-point response scale running from “Strongly Disagree” to “Disagree” to “Agree” to “Strongly Agree.” However, an easy way to hand score the ANPS 2.4 and compare scores to the norms published in the 2003 paper is to use a 3 for the highest responses (“Strongly Agree” except for reversed-scored items) and a 0 for the lowest responses. This procedure allows for the possibility of a low score of zero on each scale with scores on the six primary-process scales featured in this book ranging from 0 to 42. If you use 4 for the highest responses and 1 for the lowest responses, scores on the six primary scales will range from 14 to 56.

  For example, each of the positively worded SEEKING scale items (numbers 1, 17, 33, 49, 65, 81, and 97) would be scored as follows: Strongly Agree=3, Agree=2, Disagree=1, and Strongly Disagree=0. Correspondingly, each of the negatively worded SEEKING scale items in the even blocks (numbers 9, 25, 41, 57, 73, 89, and 105) would be reverse scored as follows: Strongly Agree=0, Agree=1, Disagree=2, and Strongly Disagree=3. Again, the order of the six primary-process ANPS 2.4 items always follows the following order: SEEKING, FEAR, CARE, ANGER, PLAY, and SADNESS with filler items separating the blocks.