The Mystery of Human Personality
We need to be agnostics first and then there is some chance at arriving at a sensible system of belief.
—D. Elton Trueblood
20th-century American Quaker author and philosopher
AS YOU READ THIS BOOK, you will be exposed to a view of human personality from a distinctly new vantage. If you are a seasoned student of personality, we hope you can briefly put aside your previous training in personality theory and suspend judgment for a while, for you may appreciate a novel approach to personality contained within these pages—one that arises from the study of the primal (evolved) emotional systems of mammalian brains rather than the diverse personality traits enshrined in the study of human languages. In any case, we hope you will find the present approach fresh and challenging, for here we focus on personality, perhaps for the first time, from the perspective of the actual neurobiologically ingrained emotional systems of mammalian brains (even though there are others who have conceptually initiated such endeavors—Robert Cloninger (2004), Richard DePue (1995), and Jeffrey Gray (1982) come easily to mind).
Of course, emotionality has traditionally been seen as the foundation of personality. That is, the classic view was based on the supposition that various presumed bodily forces (humors) that control our moods were the foundation of our temperaments. According to medieval scholars of personality, some people are sanguine, basically happy and easygoing, while others are choleric, easily irritated and willing to show their anger. Some are phlegmatic, slow, ponderous, and uninteresting (basically cold fish), and yet others are melancholic, chronically sad and depressed.
Various later approaches to personality were based on clinical experiences and insights, because many of the early personality theorists were therapists and psychiatrists (see examples in Chapter 5). Their patients were primarily people with serious behavioral and/or emotional problems, so it was natural for these early personality theorists to try to distinguish their patients on the basis of temperamental differences and to assign them to diagnostic categories. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) had compiled a taxonomy of psychological “diseases” based on medical diagnostics derived from distinct patterns of psychologically evident symptoms. One of the diagnoses Kraepelin is well known for is schizophrenia, which he originally labeled dementia praecox, or premature dementia or precocious madness, because it usually began in the late teens or early adulthood.2
If you are a therapist, physician, psychiatrist, or some other medical professional, we note that this book does not focus on using personality or personality tests to try to diagnose psychiatric problems or personality disorders, even though it may provide insights to understanding people with diverse mental problems. It is more about trying to explore the ancestral neural roots of personality, what personality means, and to gain a deeper appreciation for the individual differences that make each of us human beings on this planet not only unique but also inheritors of emotional ways of being in the world that are reflected in characteristic personalities. When extreme, such personality traits can be seen to reflect psychiatrically significant personality tendencies. As we describe in several chapters, neurogenetic findings are providing abundant support for ingrained emotional foundations for human and animal personalities. Such emerging knowledge will eventually change the way we understand human personalities as well as psychiatric disorders.
The science of psychiatry is experiencing a crisis of confidence in traditional psychiatric diagnostic categories, which was illustrated with the unveiling of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V; American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Many psychiatrists still believe that such diagnostic traditions, which arose from the way physicians learned to describe characteristic bodily disorders in the middle of the nineteenth century, are essential for progress in the field. This transformation toward a systematic classification of mental disorders, inspired by a coterie of physicians in Germany called the Berlin Biophysics Club, aimed to establish medicine on a solid scientific foundation. However, there is a growing consensus that this might not have been the best way to proceed with the diversity of mental disorders that psychiatrists currently deal with. Recognizing that we really have no good evidence for homogeneous types of brain problems that underlie many psychiatric diagnostic labels (including autism, depression, schizophrenia, and most especially personality disorders), many favor falling back on simply using consistent symptoms, namely, fundamental psychophysiological signs (the so-called endophenotypes) that may reflect the changing activities of distinct brain circuits, as a better way to approach human personality and psychiatric problems, in ways that can be scientifically linked to distinct brain systems.
Of course, the ongoing debate on the nature of human personality and the value of diagnostics in psychiatry is by no means resolved. Disagreements and debate are bound to remain with us for a long time, especially in psychiatry, because conceptual categories provide useful ways to standardize ways to prescribe increasingly large numbers of drugs that are becoming readily available to treat the various DSM-specified psychiatric categories. Regrettably, the range in medicinal effects varies enormously, and only a few have been developed by trying to model the relevant shifts in affective states in animals (for recent summaries, see Panksepp, Wright, Döbrössy, Schlaepfer, & Coenen, 2014; Panksepp & Yovell, 2014; Panksepp, 2015, 2016).
We do not delve into this active area of debate but note that the relationship between the psychiatric profession and pharmaceutical companies has solidified to such an extent that it would take a great deal of scientific data to change established practices. Robert Whitaker’s frank critique and hard-hitting condemnation of this area of medicine (see Whitaker, 2010) has emerged from the recognition that many current mind medicines often precipitate mental/personality problems other than the ones clients started with. Indeed, medicinally induced shifts in the chemistries of mind can provoke strong “opponent processes” that gradually destabilize chemistries to such an extent that feelings of normality can no longer be achieved. We return to psychiatric issues toward the end of this book in Chapter 18. Our immediate goal is to focus on the normal variability of human personality arising from the diverse characteristics of our core emotional systems and to discuss how this knowledge can help us better understand ourselves.
It is hard to define what is psychologically normal. Obviously there are many cultural and other environmental variables that impact development, but neuroscientists are revealing that it is partly based on the emotional strengths and weaknesses we are born with—variation arising from the brain manifestations of one’s genetic heritage, which are typically further shaped by individual experiences. As we describe in this book, this perspective has been amply affirmed through the identification of many genetic predispositions for diverse personality traits. But because every baby confronts the “booming, buzzing” confusions of its surrounding social world, to borrow William James’s terms for newborn mental life, we also have to pay attention to how genes are influenced by environments. The concept of epigenesis captures the simple fact that environmentally induced influences on gene expression are as influential in the construction of stable personality as one’s hereditary endowment of genes (see Chapter 15). The stability of these early influences, as expressed in the construction of basic brain circuits that control emotional feelings—more so than other affects, for example, bodily sensory and homeostatic ones—are the very bedrock of personality development. These are what modern biological psychiatrists would call the endophenotypes of the mind—the natural affective processes that guide the individualized paths of learning and memory. Indeed, not all of the types of feelings we are born with, neither the sensory ones (sweet delights and dreadful disgusts) nor the bodily homeostatic urges experienced as hunger and thirst, are as influential as the emotional systems that exist inside our brains, conveying various basic affective feelings, the strengths and weaknesses of which constitute, we suggest, the most influential brain endophenotypes for personality development.
OUR THEORETICAL ORIENTATION
Each human being is unique. Our faces and voices easily identify us as individuals. We now know that each of us is endowed, by heredity, with our own unique genetic patterns. Even identical twins develop differences over their life-span, through epigenetic effects, as well as, of course, learning (Fraga et al., 2005). While it might initially be more obvious that our physical features are different, it is also true that each of our personalities is unique as well. However, one of the great puzzles in psychology has been how to explain the origin and development of rather stable personality similarities and differences seen across many individuals. Even though we know there are strong genetic influences on our individual traits and characteristics, the sciences of psychology and neuroscience have struggled to explain how those genetic differences emerge into personality differences (Crews, Gillette, Miller-Crews, Gore, & Skinner, 2014; Weaver et al., 2014).
A partial explanation and one of the themes of this book is that our personalities are all different because of our underlying genetically based as well as environmentally promoted emotional differences that lead each of us to perceive and react to the world differently. Our unique personalities are a reflection of how we individually experience and respond to the world. Because we cannot experience our environments directly but must rely on our brains to interpret each life event, we all experience the world in our own unique ways. In a way, each of us lives in a different world because we each perceive the world somewhat differently, although in the midst of abundant differences, there are also abiding traits we share with many others.
Of course, none of us perceives our world directly. Our perceptions of the world are constructed by the brain. For instance, vision arises from light waves entering our eyes. However, our eyes do not directly “see” images; we perceive only a narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum that allows us to have vision. The light-sensitive receptors in our eyes are capable of detecting only points of light energy, like pixels on a computer screen. Some of these receptors, the cones, respond to different-frequency light waves, which create a primary experience of red, green, and blue colors. However, the eye itself does not have the capacity for identifying whole images. It is primarily our visual cortex—just under the skull at the back of our heads—that processes the ascending signals from the light receptors in our eyes, which through successive ascending neural refinements identifies subtler color differences, as well as features such as lines, motion, and eventually actual images. All perceptions—from color to objects—are created by brain functions that are experienced as representations of the world.
It requires yet another level of processing to give meaning to the images we eventually “see,” and it is at this level that we begin interpreting and adding affectively experienced values to images. It is at this stage of interpreting and adding value when major individual differences begin to emerge that provide each of us with foundational pillars for our various unique personalities. It is when we try to make sense of our images that we all begin to “see” the world in our own personal way. It is at this point that our emotional personality differences begin to become more apparent. For example, when we see a baby, we are not all equally attracted to the little one; some of us feel more warm and nurturing toward babies (females usually more than males). When we see a stranger, we are not all equally suspicious of or friendly toward the stranger; some of us feel more wary and anxious toward strangers. These feelings have been the most mysterious aspects of psychology, with little agreement on how they should be discussed, conceptualized, or studied. Our perspective here is that it is within the intrinsic strengths and weaknesses of our emotional feelings that we will find the major primal forces for the development of personality differences.
As we add our affective feelings and values to life events, we simultaneously have different thoughts and memories, as well as different behavioral reactions. The fact that two people can stand side by side and yet perceive the same scene differently with different feelings, interpretations, thoughts, and actions is what adds uniqueness to our personalities. Try this exercise with a mix of friends who are willing to cooperate in a little experiment: Ask them to imagine a somewhat bedraggled person walking toward them at dusk in a lonely parking lot as they unlock their car after a long day at work. Give them some paper and ask them to write down their likely feelings and to provide a little more information about the person approaching them. Then ask your friends to share their notes with the group. If you are fortunate enough to have a variety of personalities participating in your little game, you may be amazed at the range of responses you hear. Some will likely be concerned about the health of the person or whether the person is lost or hungry. Others may express fear of the stranger, and still others may respond with some hostility toward the vagrant. In this case, perhaps you will see differences in care and kindness—flexible empathic urges on one hand and dogmatic authoritarian and punitive ones on the other. It is these differences of feelings, interpretation, thoughts, and reactions that provide windows into our basic personality differences.
THE AFFECTIVE FOUNDATIONS OF PERSONALITY
A fuller explanation of our personality differences is that these feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and behavior reactions are all wrapped up and packaged (intimately integrated) as our various instinctive emotions. Each of the many primary emotions we have inherited is basically an evolutionarily adaptive action system with intrinsic valences—various positive and negative feelings—reflecting in part that all mammals are born with the capacity to express and experience a set of primal emotions. In his 1998 text Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp described seven of the primal emotional responses shared by all mammals, including humans. They are capitalized as SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY, to highlight their primary-process inherited nature (although this does not mean that their typical activities are not modulated by living in the world–indeed, they guide a great deal of learning). Each emotion not only has its own characteristic feelings but also guides perceptual interpretations, thoughts, and behavioral reactions, both unlearned and learned. However, the strength and sensitivity of each brain emotion system, as well as the developmental learning it has guided, vary from individual to individual. So, there is substantial variation across different people in each of these basic emotion systems, part of it inherited and part of it learned. Such variations in each of these brain emotional responses promote different perceptions and reactions that map onto diverse higher-order traits and personality characteristics—from a broad and open friendliness to a narrow and obsessive neuroticism. In developing our ideas about human personality, we discarded LUST—our sexual urgencies—as perhaps a bit “too hot to handle”: important but often so personal that people may avoid frankness in rating their other personality traits. In other words, inquiring about people’s sexual interests may be just too personal, which may promote diminished frankness about other personality dimensions.
The following are brief examples of the six blue ribbon emotions we focused on in developing our new Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (to be introduced shortly):
We all get curious and energized during new experiences, whether about new neighbors moving in next door or the excitement of buying a new car, especially our first one (all such activities entail SEEKING).
We are all frustrated when we do not get the job we want and perhaps more than a little irritated when family members do not do their share of the work (we can all get enRAGEd).
Most of us are afraid of snakes and bears and no doubt would be a bit anxious if we were lost in the woods or had to walk alone through a rundown neighborhood in a strange city. The capacity for FEARfulness is built into us.
Many of us would feel especially tenderhearted and CAREing toward baby animals and might be inclined to give a little money to a homeless beggar.
We all feel loneliness and psychological pain that comes with broken relationships, especially the death of a loved one, and a similar feeling of “separation distress” when we are socially marginalized or rejected; we call this feeling PANIC/Sadness.
We all enjoy having fun with our friends and laughing at a good joke, which are all related to ancestral PLAY urges that we still share with the other mammals.
While we humans do share emotional feelings illustrated by these six examples, all are not equally expressed in our individual personalities. That is, while we all enjoy having fun with friends, some of us are much more friendly than others and more inclined to seek out opportunities for social fun. While many of us, especially females, are prone to feel tenderness toward baby animals, few of us would be moved to actually take home a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest to try to save it. So, the strength of our inclinations and reactions associated with each of these six emotions can differ dramatically across individuals. It is the variation across these six powers of the BrainMind, with their different feelings, typically exhibited in distinct life circumstances, which have been developmentally well integrated with our perceptions, thoughts, and behavioral reactions, that help constitute our diverse, often unique personalities.
Stated another way, each of the above six basic emotions arise from our inherited cerebral tools for living—arising from ancient, highly evolved brain survival systems that color and guide our perceptions and diverse responses to life events. These six brain systems are automatically, continuously, and intimately involved in our interpretations of the life situations we encounter. Our various positive and negative affective feelings are “value indicators”—they are all ancient survival mechanisms genetically passed down through millions of generations, long before modern humans or Neanderthals walked the face of the earth, and they automatically and continuously monitor the world as we encounter it. When it comes to survival, Mother Nature (aka evolution) did not leave foundational survival issues to chance. What she did provide, with ever-increasing generosity to primates, reaching its pinnacle in our species, were higher brain tissues, namely, the most massive neocortical expansions (relative to body size), which allow us to become really smart (and all too often perplexed, indeed confused, about mental life, which is rich mixture of our affective and cognitive abilities).
It is becoming ever clearer that the lower emotional regions of the brain are very important in programming the higher reaches, namely, our various affective feeling systems govern learning processes, allowing each organism to develop cognitions that emerge in lockstep with its temperamental strengths and weaknesses. This often leads to many life situations when people simply do not understand their own motivations or the motivations of others. However, we leave this complex topic for a later time.
TOWARD A NEW PERSONALITY TEST
It is most significant that the above seven basic blue ribbon emotional brain systems are shared not only by all humans but also by all other mammals. So, your pet dogs and cats have these evolutionarily related brain emotional systems in common with humans—SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, CARE, PANIC and PLAY. (Although, as mentioned, we focus only on six, we occasionally reflect on LUST in some later chapters.) Indeed, the subject of animal personalities is reviewed in Chapter 10. For now, we emphasize that the existence of these brain systems, which are affectively (albeit perhaps not cognitively) experienced by all animals that possess them, makes these animals sentient—creatures that experience themselves in the world. The direct evidence for the existence of experienced feelings in nonspeaking animals is the simple fact that whenever we artificially arouse those systems, as with electrical deep brain stimulation (DBS), both animals and humans experience those states. Humans can directly tell us about their feelings, while we must interrogate animals that cannot speak through their behavioral choices. They can inform us of their likes and dislikes by either voluntarily turning on brain stimulation, as for SEEKING, CARE, and PLAY systems (these evoked states are rewarding), or turning off brain stimulation, as for RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC (for overviews, see Panksepp, 1998a, 2005; Panksepp & Biven, 2012). Accordingly, we developed a new human personality inventory to monitor how these shared emotions are expressed as distinct dimensions of human temperaments—a test we call the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS), presented more fully in Chapter 2 (for latest versions, see Davis & Panksepp, 2011 and the appendix).
Panksepp and his students have extensively studied and provided formal scientific names for these six brain systems. They are written in all capital letters to give them some separation from vernacular usages—to indicate that their meanings are not identical with their lowercase equivalents. Thus, the formal scientific names for these brains systems are SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. We have so far learned about the fundamental evolved nature of these emotional systems more by studying animal brains than human ones. The first three emotion systems, SEEKING, RAGE, and FEAR, have very ancient origins, because they can be traced back to reptiles and even fish. The other three, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY, are more uniquely mammalian and give mammals their higher social abilities (for instance, the CARE/Nurturance system may be one of the main sources of empathy; for a discussion see Panksepp & Panksepp, 2013). All six have been repeatedly shown to be linked to distinct personality differences across cultures, with early ANPS translations into German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Turkish, and various other languages. The seventh system, sexual LUST, bridges ancient socioerotic SEEKING urges and mammalian desires to CARE for young and for the young to PLAY with each other. Clearly some females and males are more LUSTy than others, and this could also be viewed as a personality dimension, but we chose not to include it in the ANPS—as mentioned above, we were concerned that many people would not wish to reveal this aspect of their personality to strangers and suspected that if it were included, negative affective responses to such personal questions might turn people off and thereby potentially affect their responses to some of the other emotional dimensions. It is also noteworthy that we are aware of no other personality inventory that currently includes sexuality as a personality factor (nor do they evaluate homeostatic affects like hunger and thirst, which LUST may be conceptually closer to than the other emotions, because it is also controlled by bodily states, such as hormone levels).
UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL PRIMES MAY BE ESSENTIAL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE NEUROSCIENCE OF PERSONALITY
Before we turn to personality testing, we briefly describe these fundamental emotional systems of the brain:
The SEEKING system may have originally evolved as a general-purpose foraging system (a “seek and find” system) energizing the search for food and other resources needed for survival. With other life goals, the function of this all important system (which probably lies at the core of our feelings of “selfhood,” a topic we return to in Chapter 17) was evolutionarily broadened to energize the exploration for resources in general.
The RAGE system responds when the loss of resources is threatened—for example, loss of food, family, or money—and prepares the body to fight to get them back if necessary. We also sometimes call it the RAGE/Anger system, as a reminder that these fundamental systems probably link up reasonably well to our vernacular use of traditional emotional labels.
The FEAR/Anxiety system identifies and predicts when dangers are imminent and prepares the body to either freeze or flee, depending on which response will be most adaptive.
The CARE/Nurturance system motivates and coordinates the caretaking and rearing of infants from the time they are totally dependent newborns throughout the long period of early childhood development (although, of course, the youngsters of others species are typically not called their children). However, the CARE system may also motivate social helping behaviors in general.
The PANIC/Sadness system is engaged, especially in youngsters, when they lose contact with their mothers—we assume this is the feeling of psychological distress/pain that all infant mammals and birds suddenly feel when they lose close contact with supportive others. It is often associated with crying in children separated from their parents, with the death of a loved one, and with social rejection in general. At times we have also called it the Grief system or the Sadness system, because many people don’t understand the implications of PANIC—the extremely agitated state young animals exhibit when they are lost or even accidentally separated from parents for even very short periods of time.
The PLAY/Joy system motivates physical social-engagement (aka “rough-and-tumble”) play in all young mammals and commonly provides an affectively positive developmental context for learning how to socially interact with others, which thereby facilitates social integration in general.
At their fundamental (primary-process) level, each of these six brain systems can be thought of as distinct instincts (unconditioned responses in behavioral parlance) consisting of highly integrated ways of being and acting in the world—survival systems that help engender and solidify abundant learning. They are all natural systems, meaning their basic brain structures and functions have been inherited and hence do not require individual learning (although the systems may be refined by being used). It has long been clear that we do not need to teach children to play or to feel panic when they have lost contact with their parents.
Of course, that does not mean that these instincts cannot be modified by life experiences and that related behavior patterns cannot be modified through learning for adaptive integration with current environmental circumstances. Indeed, these six brain systems govern much of the early learning that children spontaneously exhibit. For example, children quickly learn which of their friends play nicely and are most friendly toward them. They also learn that the dog that bit them was threatening when it growled and to fear and avoid growling dogs in the future, especially if they were nipped at. In short, the fundamental affective guidance provided by these six behavioral-emotional systems can be thought of as ancestral tools for living that we are born with. They are genetically provided “original equipment” that provide rapid, inborn (instinctual) answers to life challenges—ways of behaving and feeling that promoted survival of ancestral mammals many, many millions of years ago.
These six behavioral-emotional systems may be stronger or weaker in different species, but all exist to some extent in all mammalian species. They are essential for survival and, with learning, become ever more deeply embedded in our personalities. They are action-oriented systems that consistently bias our perceptions, thoughts, and actions; they are elaborated in our lives as stable behavioral-feeling patterns that contribute substantially to the growth of our personalities. Most people do not think of “motor” or “action-generating” systems as having any consciousness, but these systems have a feel to them that seems to be an intrinsic part of their organization. As noted earlier, artificial activation with electrical DBS in animals, just like natural activation in humans, feels good and bad in various ways. In formal animal-behavioral terms, these systems can be shown to be rewarding or punishing, and that is the only scientific measures of affective feelings we have in nonspeaking animals (Panksepp, 1998a). In this affective sense, all vertebrate species are conscious—they experience themselves in the world. Of course, this does not necessarily mean they are aware that they are experiencing—that higher level of reflective consciousness is reserved for animals that know they possess awareness (i.e., knowing one is experiencing), which is much harder to study in other animals than whether they feel positive or negative—good or bad in the vernacular.
THE NATURE OF THE PRIMAL EMOTIONAL AFFECTS
This point is very important: These six emotions engender feeling states within the brain (as does LUST), and these experiential characteristics are especially important when we talk about personality. Each emotion has an affective component that feels either good or bad. These affects, or feelings, are either pleasant or aversive, even in other animals. They help automatically inform animals, including humans, which internal conditions of the brain are rewarding, and hence support survival, and which are punishing, signaling that survival may be in jeopardy. Again, the SEEKING, CARE, and PLAY emotions are experienced as desirable feelings (rewarding affects), whereas the FEAR, RAGE, and PANIC emotions are all experienced as aversive feelings (punishing affects to use behavioristic language).
On the positive side, the SEEKING system provides us with a very special euphoric “buzz” (we humans commonly call it enthusiasm) as we explore possibilities and anticipate desired outcomes. The CARE system infuses us with a “warm glow” as we support the lives of our children and help others overcome their problems. The CARE system, along with the PANIC/Sadness system, may be especially important for engendering our feelings of empathy and sympathy when bad things happen to nearby others, but especially to those that we love. The PLAY system fills us with “delight” as we have fun with our friends.
On the negative side, the RAGE/Anger system sparks feelings of “irritation” and directs us to “attack” whoever or whatever threatens us or our possessions. The FEAR system makes us anxious, indeed can grip us with “terror” when we sense that our life or well-being is in danger. The PANIC/Sadness system overwhelms us with “desperate helplessness,” a painful distress (that can gradually become despair) we felt when as children we lost contact with our parents, or later in life when we lose (or are suddenly locked out of) a close, sustaining relationship.
The affective tone of our personal world—the world we individually perceptually live in at an affective level—is constructed by the positive or negative valence of these affects. In other words, it is among the pleasant or aversive qualities of these emotional feelings that we often find the value of our experiences. We positively value and are attracted to situations and experiences we associate with good feelings. We avoid and place negative values on situations and experiences that feel bad. Indeed, although many animal researchers are shy about even talking about the feelings of the animals they study (often just prefering to study learning and memory, where such concepts do not seem necessary), it seems likely that the various evolved feeling-generating systems (primal emotional affects) actually directly control many of the learning and memory processes of human and animal brains. This is a complex neurochemical story that we will not address here (but for a readable synopsis, see Panksepp & Biven, 2012, chap. 6).
IN SUM
It is surprising that no personality test has tried to represent all of these brain emotional systems explicitly and equally. As we describe in the chapters that follow, during the past century many personality tests were developed. Some did represent features such as anxiety and aggressiveness, and even curiosity (sometimes called “openness to experience”), but none focused on the whole package that we describe here. Partly this is because more recent personality tests typically started from a “top-down” perspective, from the many words and concepts we use to describe one another’s temperaments. Within the complexity of words, scientists were more prone to use complex statistics to ferret out consistent patterns among the adjectives we use to describe one another. Perhaps because an understanding of the basic brain emotional systems requires cross-species neuroscience, no one has used the full riches of our emerging understanding of the basic emotional systems of our brains, so critically important for creating our feeling of selfhood, as one critical foundation pillar for personality theory.
The ANPS that we describe in this book attempts to do that, and in so doing it allows us to better connect our increasing understanding of the brain sources of basic human emotions to the kinds of knowledge (e.g., understanding the anatomies and chemistries of these systems) that can currently be achieved by studying the brains and behaviors of other animals. In a sense, our approach is much closer to the classical medieval approaches to personality, with their four major temperamental types—sanguine (PLAYful), choleric (RAGEful), melancholic (full of that PANICy psychic pain that we commonly call sadness), and phlegmatic (the coldness of temperaments that arises perhaps from too much anxiety engendered by excessive FEAR).
Why was SEEKING not represented? Perhaps because the ancients implicitly recognized it was a universal part of mental life itself (as encapsulated in the concept of conatus, the essential force or urge underlying human effort and striving; within the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza this was the psychological “force” in every living creature to preserve its own existence (for an excellent and readable overview, see Ravven, 2013), which in its most positive form becomes the very ground of “social joy” so magnificently represented in happy-sanguine temperaments. Why was CARE not represented? Perhaps because it was more highly feminine and simply accepted as something that women are skilled at, while males are not, for the temper of those times was governed so much more by men than during our more enlightened era. And, of course, everyone knew about LUST, but for a long time few wished to talk about it openly. Before we start summarizing where we have been as humans (and at time scientists) interested in human personality, during the past century and a half of scientific psychology, we will proceed in the next chapter to our own neoclassical view of human personality as represented in the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS).