Primary Emotions
The brain is built from the bottom up. At the bottom is the reptilian brain and surrounding the top of the brain is the neocortex or as Jack Panksepp would put it, our “thinking cap.” In between is the limbic brain where our primary emotions reside. Affective neuroscience studies how these powerful emotional systems arise from ancient neural networks situated within the limbic brain.
These ancient neural systems below the neocortex constitute our ancestral mind, the affective mind that we share with all mammals and many other animals. Here reside the sources of some of our most powerful feelings. These primary emotions are the foundations upon which the beauty and ugliness of our lives have been constructed. They generate the affects or feelings of both love and caring and grief and rage and control our instinctual emotional lives.
Invasive Neuroscience Research
Invasive neuroscience techniques, such as electrode implantation, lesioning, and hormone administration, can be more easily used in animals than in humans. Human neuroscience must rely primarily on noninvasive techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and on studies of individuals with brain lesions caused by accident or disease. Thus, animal research provides useful models for understanding affective processes in humans. Affective circuits found in other species, particularly social mammals such as rats, dogs, and monkeys, function similarly to human affective networks, although nonhuman animals’ brains are more basic.
Almost all of this initial research with raw emotional affects was carried out in the lab of Jaak Panksepp. 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 the rats reacted to stimulation in the same areas in the same way. From these experiments, Panksepp learned that primary-process emotions are subcortical, since the rats without a cortex responded exactly the same. Panksepp documents all of the research in “The Archeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions.” I have devoted many hours coming back again and again to relevant sections of this text.
Jaak Panksepp’s research goes deep into wordless territory of affects or feelings where few psychologists, psychiatrists, or other researchers have gone. After years of work with lab animals he came up with seven primary affect systems:
Seven Primary Affect Systems
- SEEKING (expectancy)
- RAGE (anger)
- FEAR (anxiety)
- LUST (sexual excitement)
- CARE (nurturance)
- PANIC/GRIEF (sadness)
- PLAY (social joy)
If psychiatric research were linked more to these primary-affective systems, drugs could be developed specifically targeted for RAGE. The RAGE system runs from the amygdala to the hypothalamus and then to the periaqueductal gray (PAG).
RAGE
In all animals that Pankseep tested, RAGE can be evoked by electrically stimulating these brain regions. When the current is turned on the animals attack, usually biting objects that are in front of them. The attack becomes more intense when the current levels are increased. If these brain-stimulation procedures are carried out in humans, people tend to clench their jaws and to report feelings of intense objectless anger. As of now, no drug specifically targets rage.
Whether you are a clinician, client, educator, or researcher, affective neuroscience offers in-depth insight relating to core emotions and depression, anxiety, grief, fear, PTSD, and all aspects of personal and social life. This knowledge can be used to improve empathic understanding and therapeutic intervention. Panksepp mapped all the regions for medication research.
My blog posts are a shoutout for researchers to use Panksepp’s published research.
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
