Primary Emotional Processes

Primary Emotional Processes

Jaak Panksepp researched primary emotional processes and their neural components.  He mapped the brains of rats by connecting electrodes to parts of their brain to see if stimulating an area caused the rats to seek or avoid the stimulation.

Then he removed their cortex to see if they reacted to brain stimulation in the same way. From these experiments, Panksepp learned that primary emotional processes are subcortical since the rats without a cortex still responded exactly the same to deep brain stimulation. Panksepp documented the research in “The Archeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions.” He called his field of research “affective neuroscience.”

At birth, higher cognitive processes are absent. It is primary emotional processes that guide what infants do and feel.  We are born with a clean higher-brain cortical slate. Pankseep says that our executive cognitive processes are totally learned.

In maturity learned higher brain functions seem in complete control since they have had years to grow.  But the primary emotional processes still have the same power they had in infancy.  Higher brain functions cloak their power. For those of us with mental illness though, when something slips, the higher executive brain yields to subcortical primary emotional affects that are always ready and able to take sometimes embarrassingly instant control.

RAGE

RAGE is one of the seven primary emotional processes researched by Pankseep in his lab. I was not picked up as an infant and my sister who is six years older than me told me I screamed at the top of my lungs for hours at a time. I was in an unadulterated state of RAGE. As an adult, if I am not taking Prozac, I will slip back to a state where RAGE overpowers my higher cognitive executive processes. I might shout, scream, and behave once more like an infant. Needless to say I am obessively careful about taking my meds.

As a result of my suffering, I am invested in the study of these raw emotional processes because an understanding will assist in psychiatric and pharmacological regulation and control of primary-process affects, in my case of potentially lethal RAGE. Most research in this field is with animals because invasive research with humans would be unethical. But the field now needs another pair like Harry Harlow and John Bowlby.

Pit of Despair

In the 1950s Harry Harlow began his iconoclastic lab experiments with rhesus macaque monkeys.  His research demonstrated that food and shelter were not enough to sustain an infant. They required warm, loving care.

The Pit of Despair was a vertical chamber apparatus with a stainless steel trough and sides that sloped to a rounded bottom with a wire mesh one inch above the bottom. Waste material fell through the wire mesh and drained out of holes drilled in the stainless steel. The top of this pit was also covered with wire mesh. A small mirror allowed experimenters to look in, but the monkey could not look out.

After allowing the rhesus monkeys to bond with their natural mothers, Harlow placed monkeys between three months and three years old into the Pit of Despair. The monkeys would spend the first day or two trying to climb up the cold slippery steel sides. Within a few days, they stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed. Even the happiest monkeys came out damaged. Most never recovered.

Harlow and his researchers concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could possibly be reversed in monkeys only if it lasted less than 90 days. He estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months. After these critical periods, no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the monkeys’ abnormal behaviors and make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred.

People Pit of Despair

Harlow’s Lab Research Authenticates John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory

By the nineteen-forties, a number of psychologists were conducting studies and writing about the ill effects of children neglected under institutional care, but John Bowlby was the most influential. In 1949 the Chief of the Mental Health Section of the World Health Organization (WHO) asked Bowlby to do a report on the needs of homeless children. Bowlby spent six months researching and meeting with clinicians in the field.

His report, published in 1951 in the form of a WHO monograph entitled “Maternal Care and Mental Health,”chronicled the adverse affects of inadequate maternal care during early childhood on personality development. During the next few years, his report was translated into twelve languages and gave birth to the field of Attachment Theory. Bowlby’s report was not well received by clinicians, but the publication of Harlow’s work helped to authenticate his findings.

Like Harlow, Bowlby concluded that what is essential for mental health is that the infant and young child experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with her/his mother (and/or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment. Bowlby called this “secure attachment,” the first of his three basic attachment patterns

And like Harlow Bowlby found that even limited deprivation of three to six months during the first three or four years can produce “affectionless and psychopathic character.” He reported that early maternal deprivation results in dramatically lower IQ scores and poor physical development. Infants observed in institutional studies showed listlessness, emaciation, immobility, unresponsiveness, failure to gain weight properly, poor sleep, an appearance of unhappiness, and an inability to love or enter into relationships.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body