THE APPROACH TAKEN to personality in this book is revolutionary. It builds upon decades of careful research, not only concerning the development and application of the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales themselves (work which is already being extended by scientists around the world, myself included), but also concerning the monumental program of neuroscientific research upon which the Scales were based. This program of research, itself revolutionary, was conducted by Jaak Panksepp and his students (among whom Ken Davis may be prominently counted). The research builds upon earlier work conducted by such pioneers as Walter Hess and Paul Maclean, starting in the 1920s already. In fact, their work can ultimately be traced all the way back to the seminal observations of Charles Darwin, who dared to suggest that we human beings are after all just another species of animal.
To say that the approach taken to personality in this book is revolutionary is not to say that it is wild or surprising. It is common-sensical and obvious. But this can only be said in retrospect, now that the work has been done. It required the insight of Ken Davis and Jaak Panksepp to see the yawning gap in this field, and then to fill it with the evidence for the new personality assessment instrument they provide in this book. With the book now published, however, it becomes obvious to the rest of us that this is the most sensible way (by far) to classify and measure the basic building blocks of the human personality.
When I say that theirs is the only sensible way to proceed, I must add that we could not have done so before now. The knowledge that was accumulated through the research program of Jaak Panksepp mentioned above was a necessary prerequisite, before Ken Davis and he could do the obvious regarding personality. What I mean is that it is obvious that the classification and measurement of personality must be predicated upon an identification of the “natural kinds” that constitute the actual building blocks of personality; but what are those “natural kinds?” The research upon which this book is based (research that was grounded in deep brain stimulation studies and pharmacological probes, which revealed the elementary emotional circuits of the mammalian brain, and then traced the same circuits—in the same structures, mediated by the same neurochemicals—in the human brain) provides us with nothing less than an answer to this fundamental question.
What could be more valuable for mental science than that?
It may be confidently predicted that the re-conceptualization of personality reported in this book will be followed by a revolution of equal importance (if not greater importance) in the classification and measurement of mental disorders. Just as the instruments that preceded the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales relied upon taxonomies of personality that were generated by blind statistical measures of its superficial features (or worse, culturally and linguistically mediated self conceptions of those features), so too the classification and measurement of psychiatric disorders is embarrassingly arbitrary—grounded in and confounded by the history and conventions of the discipline, rather than empirically based understanding of how the emotional brain really works.
This book heralds a new era of personality research, but there is much more to come from the approach it adopts. It shows the promise of affective neuroscience for the psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy of the future.