Advance Acclaim

“Doctors Davis and Panksepp have made a significant contribution to personality theory, and from a novel scientific perspective, namely attempting to understand personality in terms of concepts from neurobiology and affective neuroscience. This work by Davis and Panksepp extends but also recontextualizes Cattell’s classical factor analytic work, which has long dominated the field of personality theory. This much-needed volume is not only significant addition to the The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, it is simply a must read for all personality theorists, while also offering critical insights to psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, and other mental health disciplines. Highly recommended!”

—Douglas Watt, PhD, Clinical and Forensic Neuropsychology,
Boston University School of Medicine, Lesley University
Graduate School of Psychology

“In this comprehensive and insightful exploration, Davis and Panksepp take us through an overview of modern psychology’s description of the Big Five factors and the nature of personality and explore what an affective neuroscience view of this topic offers to deepen and broaden our perspectives. We are all born with a temperament, an innate proclivity of the nervous system to shape our inner and outer responses, propensities that interact with our experiences to shape our personality as we grow. This important integration of Jaak Panksepp’s foundational contributions to understanding the sub-cortical processes involved in emotion and behavior with research on personality helps move the fields of development, psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy forward by anchoring our work with biologically based, evolutionarily informed insights into the factors that shape our minds.”

—Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., Mindsight Institute, Clinical Professor, UCLA School of Medicine, Author, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human and The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology