From Animal Models of Affect to Implications for Psychotherapeutics
BASIC EMOTIONS ARE fundamental powers of the human mind that are of utmost importance for both mental health and mental disorders. It is clear that all mammalian brains inherit a variety of emotional dispositions as ancestral tools for living. These systems, including ones for SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC (separation distress), and PLAY, are of critical importance for generating primary-process affective states—basic psychological states such as urgent interest/desire, anxiety, anger, eroticism, nurturance, sadness, and joy.
These fundamental emotional powers of the mind, which are closely affiliated with a variety of bodily states and nonspecific brain arousal systems (e.g., norepinephrine and serotonin), concurrently generate distinct emotional action tendencies as well as raw feeling states that rapidly get linked to a variety of events in the world through classical conditioning and other basic learning mechanisms. When these ancient emotional forces of the human brain become tempestuous—dysregulated beyond our understanding—overwhelming psychological problems can emerge. In humans, emotional dysregulations are invariably accompanied by cognitive “stuff”—entangled in attributions, ruminations, and all sorts of hopes, plans, and worries. When cognitions become embroiled in primary-process emotionality, emotions and the affiliated cognitions can no longer be readily distinguished. Indeed, many psychologists envision them as part and parcel of the same psychological process. This is not a scientifically wise choice, since primary-process emotional affects are initially unconditioned, “objectless,” neuroevolutionary, affect-laden response tendencies arising from very ancient lower regions of the brain, whereas practically all human cognitions are thoroughly conditioned by life experiences and language processes located within higher neocortical brain regions. Thus, cortical cognitions and subcortical emotional arousals do need to be distinguished if we want to understand how the brain eventually blends them into highly interactive mental wholes. From my perspective, social constructivism and basic emotion perspectives can coexist, and even thrive, within the complexities of brain, body, and world (Panksepp, 2007c).
Affective neuroscience has demonstrated that primary-process, prepropositional emotional energies have a mind of their own—an ancient form of phenomenal consciousness that preceded language and sophisticated human thoughts by hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary time. These are the mental “energies” I discuss in this chapter, and I envision how they might be addressed in psychotherapeutic practice in the service of better affect regulation.
An understanding of how primary-process emotion can either enrich or derail human lives is essential for scientific progress in all types of psychotherapy, as well as in the generation of a new basic neuroscience foundation for psychiatry and psychotherapy. A neurobiological understanding of the primary-process affective storms—perturbations of the core self (Northoff & Panksepp, 2008; Panksepp & Northoff, 2008)—is critically important not only for providing guidance in the development of new psychotherapeutic perspectives but also for new medicinal developments (Panksepp, 2006; Panksepp & Harro, 2004). Since I have summarized the basic neuroscience issues and affective neuroscience strategies many times (most recently, Panksepp, 2007c, 2008a), my primary goal here is to introduce some ideas that may take us toward new affective balance therapies—experiential therapies that may complement well-established cognitive–behavioral, interpersonal, and psychoanalytic therapeutic traditions.
Instinctual Antecedents of Primary-Process Psychological Entities
We are finally in an era where most thoughtful investigators agree with Freud’s deep belief in the biological foundations of the psyche, but not necessarily Freud’s psychoanalytic metapsychologies, with all their conceptual baggage, creatively constructed from limited, culture-bound clinical observations. At present, the most interesting discussions in psychiatry and psychotherapy are emerging from new interdisciplinary frontiers: (1) developmental social neuroscience (Schore, 2003a; Siegel, 1999; Stern, 2004), (2) an emerging neuropsychoanalysis (Solms & Turnbull, 2003), (3) a human and animal affective neuroscience (Panksepp, 1998a), and (4) new visionary perspectives on autonomic nervous system regulations that need to be coherently integrated with higher brain processes (see Porges, Chapter 2, this volume). These scholars are finally grappling not only with the affective nature of the human mind, but also with the deep emotional nature of the mammalian brain. It is now clear that affective values are built into the nervous system as birthrights, but not ethical and moral values, which are epigenetic emergents of developmental landscapes.
The correct view of basic emotions should eventually transform our conception of human nature, emotional disorders, our visions of core consciousness and affect regulation, the nature of object relations, and ways to achieve emotional homeostasis through therapeutic and lifestyle changes. This synthesis cannot be achieved without a correct foundational vision of how primary-process affects and emotion are organized in the brain, and how all of that relates to the massive cognitive plasticity of the mammalian brain (Doidge, 2007), especially the massive culture-induced plasticity of the human brain. Emotional and other affective systems lie at the core of such plasticities.
The only reason that cognitions have been so commonly envisioned to lead the way is because many practitioners of cognitive science, and hence most psychotherapeutics, have yet to assimilate the evidence about brain emotional systems from basic affective neuroscience principles. This bias is partly a residue of behaviorism, a very incomplete science that many have now rejected because of its narrow “externalist” prison-house mentality, which had just one precious gem to offer psychotherapy—behavior modification based on the rearrangement of reinforcement contingencies, in the context of no coherent vision, even a rejection of the affective interior of the mammalian mind. However, that externalist view continues to skew cognitive thinking in the field and to lead to continued conceptions of organisms as “passive” association-based, information-processing machines. What a deep neuroevolutionary psychology, based on a cross-species affective neuroscience, can now offer is a more realistic alternative—an “active” organism view wherein all mammals are endowed with rich neurobiological, internally experienced emotional processes. (For a thorough elaboration of such issues, see Northoff & Panksepp [2008] and Panksepp & Northoff [2008], a view that highlights how the active organismic concepts need to replace the passive “information-processing” views of behaviorism and cognitive science.) We can move in uniquely new directions through an understanding of primary-process emotions—namely, those brain–mind processes that constitute the neuroaffective complexities that lie under those behavioristic oversimplifications called “rewards,” “reinforcements,” and “punishments” (Panksepp, 2005b) and that guide the social constructions and clinical reconstructions of human minds.
Dan Siegel said it well in the foreword to Louis Cozolino’s (2002) synthesis of clinical and neuroscientific approaches to the human mind: Clinicians, he said, immerse themselves “in the stories of individuals who come for help in feeling better…. Whatever the approach, lasting change in therapy occurs as a result of changes in the human mind…which involve changes in the functions of the brain. Exactly how the mind changes during the therapeutic process is the fundamental puzzle that the synthesis of neuroscience and psychotherapy seeks to solve” (p. XX). In my estimation, a most critically important scientific aspect of the puzzle of how the mind changes during the therapeutic process is how human brains generate primary-process emotional feelings. Here I explore how an understanding of such foundational issues may help us construct more effective affective balance therapies that include how embodied affects interact with cognitive processes and conditions of the body, and how personal growth and mental remolding can be achieved through psychological as well as somatic interventions.
Although psychotherapy has traditionally sought to deal more with the cognitive–emotional labyrinth of individual lives, a few revolutionaries have attempted to refocus the discussion toward affective issues (Fosha, 2000, 2001, and Chapter 7, this volume). I explore how such therapeutic models can be integrated with our emerging understanding of universal emotional principles of the mammalian brain. While psychotherapy must obviously continue to deal realistically with individual lived lives, we are finally entering an era where evidence-based affective views of the mammalian brain can provide an understanding of cross-mammalian, universal, affective-emotional processes that may provide a scientific foundation for new affective and body oriented therapies. Because we are beginning to comprehend the neurodynamics of primary-process emotion, we can also envision new variants of affective balance therapies (ABTs—see below).
Emotion as Inherited Ancestral Tools for Living
There is only space enough here to outline a few key issues arising from affective neuroscience (for more detailed coverage, see Panksepp, 1998a, 2005a). My goal is to highlight how an understanding of primary-process emotions in the human brain–mind has (1) been illuminated through evolutionarily informed animal models of basic emotional systems, (2) provided a novel foundation for psychiatric and psychological science, and (3) can provide new ideas for the development of new biological and psychotherapeutic interventions. Key questions I address here include: How is raw affective experience created within the brain? How do the mental changes of these affective experiences relate to emotional disorders? What are the implications of this knowledge for achieving emotional homeostasis, greater feelings of well-being, and healthier outlooks on life?
The most effective current strategies for getting at the core nature of emotional feelings recognize that prepropositional affective processes can, at least early in development, exist in the brain independent of the enormous complexities of learning, as well as of associated cognitive processes with which they always interact later in real life. In their raw primary-process form, they are best studied in animal models where the detailed neuroscientific work can be done.
In contrast, the study of human beings is essential for characterizing the cognitive–affective aspects of mind that become imbalanced during the affective storms created by primary-process emotional imbalaces. By understanding the neurobiological nature of our cognitive apparatus, which is dynamically and developmentally constructed from life experiences, we are in a better position to understand how we might undo faulty programming, some of which has epigenetically become part of the maladaptive hardware of the brain. Here we envision “cognitions” to be those brain information-processing functions that are integrally linked to the sensory–perceptual portals of the mind, whereas raw “emotions and affects” reflect some of the most important within-brain organizing principles for understanding the powers of our ancestral mind. Whereas the cognitive aspects are linked more to the programming of each individual’s development, raw emotions and affects represent our ancient, inherited tools for living.
A foundational understanding of basic emotional-affective feelings can be derived from a study of our animal emotional circuits, all of which are subcortically concentrated. Animal models have definitively demonstrated that all basic emotional operating systems are organized in deep prepropositional, precognitive subcortical regions. What this means is that the raw emotional tools for feeling and living are not created by lived experiences, although they may be shaped by them. When we are first born, we are cognitively “dumb.” Emotions simply allow us to act and feel in certain distinct ways, without containing any intrinsic knowledge about how the present world is organized. They are ancestral memories, successful solutions to living encoded in genetically dictated brain systems. How these raw emotional tools, provided by Mother Nature, link up to world events is of momentous importance for lived lives, sometimes proceeding smoothly and efficiently, promoting mental health, sometimes chaotically and inefficiently, promoting mental turmoil.
In other words, the raw emotional processes are, at birth, minimally connected up to busyness of world events. There are only a few evolutionarily derived “sign-stimuli” to set them off—such as pain, promoting fear, and the thwarting of SEEKING urges, promoting anger. They gradually get linked to cognitively detailed personal experiences. In other words, most of the “object relations” of emotional systems to world events have to be learned, and so there is a vast variety of emergent processes that can differ substantially among individuals in their personality development. For those who have had the fortune to be reared in supportive, mental-health-sustaining early environments, highly adaptive world relationships emerge. Among those whose “object relations” have emerged in the midst of various negative affects, there will be learned patterns that can disrupt the smooth flow of living for a lifetime. By reintegrating better object relationships in the context of ABTs, people can gradually become masters of their own affective-emotional dynamics, rather than being mastered by them.
Currently, psychotherapeutically relevant cognitive issues remain more slippery than our understanding of basic emotions. We can easily reach moments of therapeutic clarity in the midst of clinical sessions only to rapidly have all that progress slip away when clients, on their own between sessions, regress to their old cognitive–affective habits. This is because each of the primary-process emotions has enslaved large cognitive territories for its own self-serving purposes. The stranglehold that self-centered emotional systems can have on cognitive processes can be overwhelmingly robust. “Reconsolidation” of affective–cognitive memories needs to be a prime concern of therapy. As I consider toward the end of this chapter, it might also be possible to solidify therapeutic change if we learn to infuse therapeutic emotional–cognitive change more directly from affectively rich body dynamics into the process or restructuring of mind.
For long-term success, we must be able to bring affects and cognitions into a new harmony, using therapeutic strategies that deal forthrightly with the primary-process affective processes in the realm of affect regulation and affective–cognitive restructuring, rather than just the secondary and tertiary cognitive representations of these processes. Mental health ultimately means that an individual, through rich emotion-affirming encounters with living, has integrated his or her life in such a way that the emergent self-structures, deeply affective (Northoff & Panksepp, 2008; Panksepp, 1998b; Panksepp & Northoff, 2008), can steer a satisfying, cognitive course through future emotional jungles of lived lives.
Growing a Better Understanding of Human Affective Life Through Animal Models
Both human and animal brains are functionally structured entities, evolutionarily layered, where the foundational lower aspects of mind constrain the developmental trajectories of the higher cognitive aspects that vary considerably among different species and different developmental trajectories. Although all layers are interactive, with many neuronal and psychological interconnections between higher and lower brain regions, the basic principles of subcortical emotional organization are so strikingly similar in all mammals that credible translations can be made from brain research on those systems in animal models to principles of great importance for understanding the human mind. This does not mean that there will not be abundant differences in fine detail across species, but that general principles can be derived—that shared psychobehavioral dynamics and underlying neurochemical codes can be identified.
It is scientific fact, and not just conjecture, that a series of cross-mammalian emotional systems has been revealed through animal brain research. These emotional systems, concentrated heavily in the medial structures of the brain—from the midbrain periaqueductal gray, through the medial regions of the diencephalon (both hypothalamus and thalamus) to basal forebrain nuclei; ranging from the bed-nucleus of the stria terminalis, preoptic area, septum, and basal ganglia (e.g., the nucleus accumbens), up toward the amygdala, insula, and various medial frontal lobe structures (including the anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and medial prefrontal cortex)—all figure heavily in the genesis of a variety of emotional or clinical disorders (Panksepp, 2004b, 2006). The amygdala is not the center of our emotionality. All of the above structures are especially important for our diverse emotional-affective arousals.
How do we know that such core executive emotional networks for emotion do exist? We can activate a variety of instinctual emotional responses merely through electrical stimulation of the same subcortical brain regions in all mammals ever tested. Likewise, ethological animal models of emotions have long supported the existence of at least seven basic emotional systems. Such approaches confirm that all basic emotional systems are concentrated in homologous subcortical regions of the brain (Panksepp, 1998a, 2005a). Thus, there are three critically important lines of evidence:
• First, an ethological analysis of natural behavior patterns has demonstrated from time immemorial (including Darwin’s [1872/1965] superb analysis and synthesis) that animals exhibit a series of emotional behavior patterns that are strikingly similar across mammalian species, including humans.
• Second, most of our functional knowledge about the underlying systems has been derived from studies using electrical brain stimulation (ESB) and chemical brain stimulation (CSB). A large variety of very similar emotional behavior patterns can be evoked by application of localized ESB and CSB within specific neural regions, which have been intensively studied only in nonhuman mammals. This does not mean that there are “centers” for emotions; rather there are specific places (“sweet” and “sour” spots in the brain) where the underlying widely ramifying networks can be aroused to provoke global, coherent, emotional state changes in all mammals, as well as birds and reptiles (although the data base is not as rich as for mammals).
• Third, these systems are neither informationally encapsulated “modules” or mere behavioral “output” systems (as some social constructivists continue to claim; Barrett, 2006). Rather, they are affectively tinged emotional integrative systems that interact with many higher and lower brain processes. Neither animals nor humans are neutral about such arousals. Animals either approach (and turn on) or avoid (or turn off) such central state shifts. These conclusions, with the needed psychological resolution, were confirmed in humans, mostly in the era of psychosurgery—affective shifts, closely related to the kinds of instinctual emotional arousals seen in animals, can be induced in humans (Heath, 1996; Panksepp, 1985). The fact that we now have a credible scientific way to understand how raw emotional affects are engendered in the brain has enormous implications not only for the development of new forms of psychotherapy but also for a new psychiatric systematics not yet institutionalized in documents such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Panksepp, 2004a, 2006).
Let us briefly consider the seven basic emotional systems that are solidly and consistently supported by a cross-species affective neuroscience. They are SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAYfulness. These emotional systems are labeled in capitals primarily to minimize mereological fallacies (i.e., part–whole confusions) but also to highlight that specific brain systems are being discussed. The capitalization is used to alert readers to the claim that these emotional primes may be necessary brain systems for those types of emotional behaviors and feelings, although by no means sufficient for the higher-order cognitive–emotional manifestations that may arise from these systems engaged in real-world activities. These systems make organisms “active agents” in the world: Animals that seek to engage and understand affectively relevant world events as opposed to simply being passive stimulus–response or information-processing behavioral robots (again, detailed coverage of these systems is available in Panksepp, 1998a, 2005a).
Let me focus on the Big 7 by starting with the SEEKING system, a most intriguing and highly generalized emotional system—one that all the other emotional systems may depend upon for their own appointed affairs. This system remains poorly recognized in most psychological theories, partly because it is involved in all motivational processes. It has been mislabeled as “the brain reward system” by behaviorists not interested in the nature of emotions. As we have repeatedly discussed, a brain reward system is a highly misleading concept (Ikemoto & Panksepp, 1999). Yes, mild arousal of the SEEKING system feels good in a special way, but this good feeling is not at all like a consummatory reward. It is the epicenter of the excitement of living, much of which consists of the pursuit of rewards. Perhaps the SEEKING system needs to be recruited for all highly effective educational and psychotherapeutic activities.
1. The SEEKING/Desire System (for most recent reviews, see Alcaro et al., 2007; Panksepp & Moskal, 2008). Where would we (or other animals) be if we did not have an active “explorer” inside the brain to find resources, to make new discoveries, and to serve as a foundation for practically all the libidinal aspirations of the human heart? The SEEKING system mediates appetitive desire—that is, the urge to find, to consume, and at times to hoard the fruits of the world. It is constituted of many chemical systems, but the one that provides major psychobehavioral “push” for the system, and hence best serves to highlight its anatomy, is the mesolimbic dopamine system that arises from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and projects through the lateral hypothalamus to the ventral striatal nuclei, especially the nucleus accumbens, olfactory tubercle, and further up to medial cortical regions. This “appetitive motivational system” energizes the many engagements with the world as individuals seek goods from the environment as well as meaning from the everyday occurrences of life. We can now also recognize this system as a major foundational substrate for Spinoza’s concept of conatus—a system that energizes our “intentions in actions.”
Animals come to “desire” to self-activate—to self-stimulate—this system in addictive ways. Activation of the system is “rewarding.” Practically all addictive drugs (especially the psychostimulants) and addictive behaviors (e.g., compulsive gambling, sex, listening to music) derive motivational push and craving from the dopaminergic part of this positively motivated SEEKING system. Although highly resolved cognitive information descends into this system, the dopamine neurons of the VTA pass on a simple message: to behave in appetitively aroused, goal-directed ways, increasingly directed toward environmental cues that predict rewards as well as safety in dangerous situations.
Recent work indicates that this system contributes substantially to socio-sexual bonds and loving feelings, even to musical thrills. Rather than being “the reward” system, this is better conceptualized as a “well-being” system. The many interactions of the SEEKING system with higher brain regions highlight the degree to which basic emotive state-control systems can link up with cognitive systems that mediate secondary learning and tertiary thought processes, leading ultimately to awareness and thoughtful appraisals. It is best to recruit this system in every form of psychotherapy, for it is a generalized substrate for all the other emotional processes, from the establishment of libidinal social bonds to the seeking of safety in dangerous situations.
2. The FEAR/Anxiety System (for recent review, see Panksepp, 2004a). A basic FEAR system, remarkably similar across all mammals, provides a sentry function to alert organisms to all kinds of dangers that threaten the integrity of the body and of life itself. The core of this system interconnects central amygdalar regions via the ventral amygdalofugal pathways (VAFP) to anterior and medial hypothalamic regions, and then on to the periaqueductal gray (PAG).
All along the trajectory of this transhypothalamic system, freezing and flight responses can be elicited with localized ESB, accompanied by appropriate autonomic arousals. Activity in this system is the unconditioned response that mediates classical conditioning of fear, with frozen postures when arousal of the system is modest, and with intense flight when arousal is stronger. These functions diverge in the midbrain, with flight (a putative high dopamine state) being mediated by dorsal PAG structures while freezing (perhaps a low dopamine state) is elaborated more ventrally within the PAG. The associated affective state of trembling and uptight trepidation, especially when triggered by physical pain, readily becomes associated with many world events—with specific contexts coded in the hippocampus and with more discrete cues, like spiders and vipers, via the lateral amygdala (LeDoux, 1996). Humans stimulated in these same brain regions report being engulfed by an intense free-floating anxiety that appears to have no environmental cause. This system generates pure trepidation, the “fear itself” that President Roosevelt emphasized when he rallied the country to fight World War II with the slogan “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
This system is especially important for promoting generalized anxiety disorders, neurotic disorders, and specific phobias. It is possible to produce symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) simply by repeatedly stimulating this system, which leads to what Bob Adamec has called “limbic permeability,” whereby minimal stimuli develop the capacity to trigger full-blown PTSD symptoms (Adamec & Young, 2000). There is a host of neuropeptide chemistries along this system that are potential targets for development of new antianxiety and antitrauma medications (Panksepp & Harro, 2004; Panksepp, et al., 2007), which currently include cholecystokin and substance P antagonists as well as cycloserine and corticosteroids that can modulate memory reconsolidations (Adamec & Young, 2000; De Quervain, 2008).
3. The RAGE/Anger System (for recent reviews, see Panksepp & Zellner, 2004; Siegel, 2005). To the best of our knowledge, this system is the primal source of angry feelings, closely paralleling the FEAR system but with nuanced differences. For instance, in the amygdala, corticomedial areas elaborate rage whereas basolateral areas mediate fear; similarly, the RAGE components descend to the medial hypothalamus via the stria terminalis, whereas the FEAR components descend via the VAFP. Activation of some of these sites has been found to provoke sudden anger attacks in humans (e.g., Sano, et al., 1970). Normally, anger is readily aroused by restraint and frustration, particularly when organisms do not get what they SEEK and want. This system is often intertwined with the FEAR system, with which it probably interacts in reciprocating ways during agonistic social encounters. As with all other basic emotional systems, higher cortical processes, especially in the frontal lobes, can provide inhibition, direction, and other forms of cognitive regulation over this impulsive urge, yielding internalized irritability, hatreds, and resentments.
Many emotional problems result from the inhibition of anger. Aggressive irritability is also highly dysregulated in trauma, both in terms of inappropriate aggression toward others as well as directed internally toward the self. For instance, when children are demeaned, ignored, sexually abused, or beaten, such domestic atrocities generate intense anger and irritability, often toward caretakers, but often also toward themselves. Obviously, traumatized children need to be rescued from their maladaptive environments before any therapeutic interventions can work. When the time is ripe, such children need to be gently reintroduced to a secure social base, with abundant laughter and the PLAYful joy of life (see below). Such positive affects may automatically help diminish the long-term emotional wounds inflicted by abuse.
Conversely, the experience and occasional expression of anger, in a regulated fashion, may be highly adaptive, leading to feelings of empowerment, assertion, and an overall sense of dominance. Affective therapies that permit the honest expression of angry impulses could help set the stage for learning better regulatory strategies.
4. The LUST/Sexual Systems (see Pfaff, 1999). There is a core sensualist system in everyone. Sexual urges have robust instinctual substrates. LUST networks, somewhat different in males and females, link up with SEEKING urges to provide gender-specific libidinal drive. Overall, the medial amygdala and preoptic area are especially important for male sexual urges, with an abundance of the neuropeptide vasopressin at the core of this system. In contrast, female sexuality is more strongly regulated by oxytocin circuits that find their origin in the basal forebrain and anterior hypothalamic regions, which project heavily into the medial hypothalamus for the consummatory phase of female sexual behavior, even though the appetitive phase is more likely to be facilitated by dopamine SEEKING urges. While humans can exercise extensive restraint over such urges because of the power of their higher cognitive mechanisms, most other animals follow no such cultural mandates. That means that erotic impulses are often especially thwarted in human societies, blocking the free flow of libidinal “energies.”
In any event, gender-typical sexual systems are laid down, under specific gonadal hormonal influences, early in development, before babies are born, but these potentials are not fully activated until puberty, when gonadal hormones are secreted in abundance to arouse specific neuropeptide sex regulators that promote intense, but somewhat distinct, desires in males and females. Testosterone promotes vasopressin transmission, which may intensify male sexual assertiveness as well as jealousy (Panksepp, in press), whereas estrogen promotes oxytocin transmission in the brain and female-typical receptivity. Because of the way male and female bodies get organized during gestation, male-type desires can flower in female brains and female-type desires can thrive in male brains. These peptidergic circuits have been implicated in human sexuality and homosexuality, and they “light up” dramatically during human orgasms (Holstege, et al., 2003).
Of course, problems in libido are pervasive in psychiatric disorders, but instead of being a primary problem, they are often seen as subsidiary symptoms, except for distinct pathologies such as pedophilia. The need for specific libido-modulating pharmacological agents remains in great demand in this era of fine medications for erectile dysfunctions, with hardly any yet available for libido dysfunctions (e.g., abnormally low desire).
5. The CARE/Nurturance System (for a comprehensive neuroscience summary, see Numan & Insel, 2003). Mammalian infants would not survive unless mothers were sincere and devoted “nest builders” fathers typically have weaker CARE urges in their brains and hence have diminished motivation for caretaking behaviors. These systems are richly represented in anterior cingulate regions, downward to septal and nearby preoptic regions, then on to the VTA, where interactions with dopamine-based SEEKING mandates help add to the urgency of maternal intent. Maternal nurturant instincts, activated prior to birth by changing tides of hormones—increasing estrogen, prolactin and oxytocin along with diminishing progesterone—help prepare the mother for the arrival of the infant, sensitizing her brain to help assure that interaction with the newborn is a special delight. Oxytocin and prolactin are especially important in engendering the sustained touching required for nurturant care and milk sharing, as well as promoting confident and trusting can-do attitudes. Perhaps all these changes can be conceptualized as increased “confidence” (Panksepp, 2009).
As with all emotions, there is variability in the intensity and devotion of CARE energies arising from the overall emotional strength and resilience of the caretaker. The more devoted patterns of nurturance, such as abundant anal–genital licking in rats, facilitate psychobehavioral stress resistance and cognitive–emotional improvements in offspring (Szyf, McGowan, & Meaney, 2008). The neurochemistries of maternal care, especially heightened secretions of oxytocin, facilitate maternal moods that facilitate strong bonding with offspring—brain changes that are foundational for nurturant love.
The potential of agents such as intranasally applied oxytocin in ameliorating variants of depression, especially postpartum depression, and promoting prosocial moods deserves evaluation. Dysregulations in nurturant motivation may eventually be found to contribute to many emotional endophenotypes in some future, affective symptom-based biological psychiatry.
6. The PANIC or GRIEF/DISTRESS System. When young children get lost, they are thrown into a PANIC because they possess separation-distress circuitry, a major source of psychic pain. They cry out for care, and their feelings of sudden aloneness and distress reflect the ancestral neural codes of the separation-distress system from which adult sadness and grief are constructed. Indeed, there is a robust Sad Poet—nourishing existential attitudes—within most of us. The intrapsychic pain of social loss arises, in part, from brain systems that mediate separation-distress calls (crying). Brain chemistries that exacerbate feelings of distress (e.g., corticotropin releasing factor) and those that powerfully alleviate distress (e.g., brain opioids, oxytocin, prolactin) figure heavily in the genesis of social attachments and perhaps the regulation of depressive affect (Nelson & Panksepp, 1998; Watt & Panksepp, 2009). These systems parallel the CARE system to a substantial extent, for mothers need automatic detection mechanisms for when care is most urgently needed. Again, the anterior cingulate, ventral septal, and dorsal preoptic areas, as well as the bed nucleus of the stria trerminalis, dorsomedial thalamus, and the PAG figure heavily in the generation of sadness, grief, and crying (Herman & Panksepp, 1981; Panksepp, et al., 1988).
It is hard to imagine how therapy could yield successful outcomes if there were no sense of warmth, attachment, and care between clinician and client. If therapists cannot assume an interpersonal stance in which they resonate with the psychic pain of the client, there can never be that sense of trust that is critically important for the healing touch—the foundation of the clinically very useful placebo effect—to take hold in the client’s mind. There will always be a residue of suspicion of manipulation as opposed to the deep acceptance that opens the portals for change—for feelings of redemption and salvation, without narcissistic transference, that should lie at the core of every therapeutic interaction. The attitude of CARE—nurturant verbal guidance through the affective possibilities of life—is essential for the empathic stance that is essential for therapy.
CARE and PANIC/GRIEF/Separation distress are the Janus-faced twins of deep social attachments, and it will be interesting to see how their shared chemistries, especially oxytocin and endogenous opioids, can eventually be used therapeutically. These are the chemistries that are currently most likely to increase or decrease our capacity to create intersubjective spaces with others. Medicinal use of such social chemistries may one day allow clinicians to selectively enhance prosocial emotional feelings that may promote therapeutic progress. Many of us are waiting to see if supplementing therapeutic situations with nurturant activities can promote the release of endogenous opioids and oxytocin, but also whether supplementation with such hormones (e.g., intranasal oxytocin before a therapy session, perhaps in both therapists and client) could enhance therapeutic flow by allowing both to work more effectively in the present intersubjective moments.
Precipitous arousal of the separation-distress system may be one of the underlying causes for panic attacks (Panksepp, 1998a; Preter & Klein, 2008). Our understanding of the psychobiology of social attachments, which has largely arisen from work on these neurochemistries, is also being link up with some preliminary understanding of childhood disorders such as autism. Some children may be socially aloof partly because they are addicted to their own self-released opioids as opposed to those activated by significant others (Panksepp, Lensing, Leboyer, & Bouvard, 1991).
Although social-isolation-induced psychic pain is pervasive in many psychiatric disorders, the PANIC emotional system stands out as a major vector, heads and shoulders above others, in one psychiatric syndrome. That is depression and its many variants. Ultimately it is the pain of social loss, whether the loss of Mommy when one is young or social status when one is older, that opens the gateway to depression. The chronic sense of aloneness when social bonds have gone sour pervades many psychiatric syndromes, and it is the despair that follows the initial phase of acute protest that typically accompanies loss of social support or chronic stress, which sets in motion many symptoms of depression (Watt & Panksepp, 2009). Our understanding of the basic chemistries of the social brain has barely started to impact psychiatric practice. For instance, “safe opioids,” such as the mixed mu-opioid receptor agonist/antagonist, deserve a more prominent role in psychiatric practice (Bodkin, et al., 1995). Such issues should come to the forefront when psychiatry begins to once again discuss the nature of brain emotional endophenotypes and the nature of basic affects (Panksepp, 2006).
Even though we currently have abundant research on fearful behaviors, there is attention given to the conditioning of anxiety-like behavior but little discussion of the underlying FEAR circuitry. Although there is some attempt to relate such data to psychiatric disorders, such as panic attacks (Busch & Milrod, 2004), it is often forgotten that in people with anxiety disorders, it is the internal feeling of tension and persistent negative affect that lies at the heart of their clinical problems. However, negative affect that accompanies panic comes in several forms, suggesting that at least two distinct types of underlying processes need to be considered in panic disorders. The panic attack itself is a precipitous disconnection from the comforts of the everyday world, where a “black hole” opens up under an individual and his or her whole sense of security is temporarily demolished, often in a time-limited ways as the emotional storm runs its course. Many simply see this as a sudden fear response; an alternative view is that this precipitous feeling of discomfort arises from sudden arousal of the PANIC/separation-distress system (Busch & Milrod, 2004). According to this nontraditional view, the FEAR system is largely involved in engendering the anticipatory anxiety that begins to fill the time between successive panic attacks. As people begin to feel anxious about being victims of unpredictable panic attacks, they become chronically anxious. Thus, while the feeling of panic may be due more to the PANIC/separation-distress system, the anticipatory anxiety is probably due more to the sustained arousal of the FEAR system (Panksepp, 2003; Preter & Klein, 2008).
If this view is correct, then animal models as well as the clinical therapeutic enterprise need to be clear about how these two anxiety states differ. Do they have different sources in the brain? How do they interact? What needs to be done about each type of dysregulation? With a better understanding, we might be able to educate clients on how to best manage the unusual triggers in their emotional systems. For instance, perhaps when a panic attack is about to start, slow, deep rhythmic breathing, along with the concurrent active expression of happy movement dynamics, could abort the forthcoming attack (see further discussion below, on possible ABTs). Then it might be a very different issue as to what we might do to minimize the sustained anticipatory anxiety that chronically darkens a person’s life. Perhaps physical exercise along with meditative/mindfulness practices would help minimize such mood problems, allowing individuals to learn how to self-manage panic attacks. Of course, the role of different medications in the control of each should always be kept in mind (Preter & Klein, 2008) in case the psychotherapeutic maneuvers prove less effective than desired.
7. The PLAY Systems. There is a jester in all of us. Thank goodness, for it can make play out of work—including, potentially, psychotherapeutic work. These networks of the brain have been the most recent revelations of affective neuroscience. It is noteworthy that the neocortex is not needed for this emotional urge, just as it is not needed for any of the other primary-process emotions (Panksepp, Normasell, Cox, & Siviy, 1994). However, it is becoming clear that play has most remarkable effects on the cortex, programming it to become fully social, as long as the play energies are well used (Panksepp, 2008b). The core of the PLAY system is within medial zones of the thalamus (the parafascicular area, rich in opioids, is especially important; Siviy & Panksepp, 1987), as are ascending dopamine systems, which seem to be integrally important for the joy of laughter (Burgdorf, et al., 2007).
It is a blessing that the urge for social play—for joyous physical engagement with others—was also not left to chance by evolution, but is built into the instinctual action apparatus of the mammalian brain. Although PLAY circuitry has not been mapped with brain stimulation as completely as the other emotional primes, a laughter-type component is now well mapped in a rodent model (Burgdorf et al., 2007).
Playfulness is probably an experience-expectant process that brings young animals to the perimeter of their social knowledge, to psychic places where they must learn about what they can or cannot do to each other. Play allows animals to be woven into their social structures in effective but friendly ways. Young animals physically engage with each other in order to navigate social possibilities in assertive, joyous ways. Although many play actions consist of vigorous chasing, pouncing, and wrestling, these only highlight that young animals are exercising potentials for social dominance through positive social interchange. Young animals readily communicate how much they enjoy these activities, partly by play vocalizations (e.g., 50 kHz chirps in rats) that can also be induced by tickling them. We have recently challenged our colleagues to consider that joyous “laughter,” so common in human play, also exists in other species (Burgdorf & Panksepp, 2006; Panksepp & Burgdorf, 2003; Panksepp, 2007b).
I would suggest that any therapist who can capture the therapeutic moment in mutually shared play episodes will have brought the client to the gateway of happy living. To the extent that the client can be held there, in both body and mind, the therapist will have offered one of the greatest emotional gifts that psychotherapy, especially child therapy, can ever provide. At the end of this paper I briefly return to this most joyous of brain emotional systems that is so richly expressed in body dynamics that are, perhaps, the foundation of dance. It should have a very special place in body therapies, from childhood to old age.
Higher-Order Emotions
There are, of course many other basic affects, from disgust to sweet delights, from hunger to thirst, but those are properly called sensory and homeostatic affects, not emotional ones. The emotional feelings are the ones that figure most prominently in the genesis of psychiatric disorders. There are also a host of socially constructed emotions, from guilt to jealousy to shame, that arise from the basic emotional system interacting with learning as well as higher cognitive and cultural processes (secondary and tertiary processes; for a discussion of jealousy, see Panksepp, in press). All are rooted in the emotional primes, but they take on their form from specific life experiences rather than any known evolutionary epistemology that exists in our genetically dictated brain networks.
Very briefly, the affective neuroscience view of affect generation in the brain is linked dynamically to the intrinsic instinctual action repertoires of brain emotional systems. This can be a two-way street. We can utilize our explicit, voluntarily activated expressions of emotional actions to modify our mood states, and the more dynamically we generate emotional actions, the more affective strength we can engender (Panksepp & Gordon, 2003). Might we be able to use these “energies,” especially the positive emotions (SEEKING, LUST, CARE, and most certainly PLAYful dynamics), in conjunction with cognitive restructuring, to solidify therapeutic change? Might they be utilized to help reconsolidate aversive memories so that more adaptive, affectively gentle, remembrances replace stress-engendering ones?
The prevailing cognitive view of mind remains starkly incomplete without the affects. A common belief among cognitively oriented scholars, albeit not therapists who deal with troubled human lives, is that being scared (derived from the basic feeling of fear) is caused largely by the way people think. That is the more obvious part of cognitive–affective dynamics. The alternative they rarely consider, which every clinician must face, is that FEARful, RAGEful and PANICy feelings have a mind of their own, a raw affective consciousness, that interacts with, and can run roughshod over, cognitive awareness. The internal forces of anxiety can restructure the cognitive apparatus so that troubled people can no longer recruit the power of their universal SEEKING urges and the positive social affects, from loving CARE to joyous PLAYfulness, that open up the rich possibilities of a deeply inquisitive, satisfying, and LUSTy life. One reason eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy may work (Bisson, et al., 2007) is because it sets in motion a SEEKING-exploratory urge that can help restructure the way trauma has solidified in the brain. For instance, investigative eye movements and similar exploratory movements may allow therapeutic reconsolidations to be promoted because the SEEKING-exploratory system is well designed to lay down new memories, and because every aroused emotional state can exert commanding influences over cognitive restructurings. This is what future ABT approaches may seek to maximize.
The primary-process affects are internal signals indicating the various intrinsic zones of comfort and discomfort in living. These positive and negative affects indicate the presence of an array of life supporting and life-detracting environments. Through our affects we can learn more about such conditions of living by being connected to real-world events. The aim of therapy must be to restore a healthy appreciation for the mental and environmental conditions that promote well-being. I would anticipate that clients will often experience enormous relief to simply be educated about their emotional primes and to recognize how they can become masters over these primes rather than being mastered by them. The mere act of learning about them as ancient evolutionary tools for living can take an enormous burden off troubled minds. A better understanding of our ancient emotional energies may allow individuals to better deal with the upsetting feelings of the brain and to develop cognitive habits that help engender more positive feelings.
We must worry about the current status of biological psychiatry and the neuroscientific approaches to psychiatric disorders, wherein the varieties of affective experiences are all too often excluded from the active discussion of what is going on within the brain–mind during psychiatric problems. Indeed, an understanding of the emotional–instinctual action dynamics of the brain provides (1) a scientific way to understand how primary-process affective processes are generated in the brain (a topic extensively discussed elsewhere: Panksepp, 2005a, 2005b, 2008c), and (2) a way to envision how we might be able to recruit such bodily dynamics within experiential, affective, and body-oriented psychotherapies. For instance, one could envision inclusion of very basic emotional exercises, such as simulated “pure” laughter, within therapeutic interventions (Panksepp & Gordon, 2003). Such ABTs may provide an evidence-based way to modify emotional feelings directly, and to use such therapeutically facilitated affective attitudes as a foundation for restructuring the cognitive dynamics with which individuals can confront the world with more confidence and an overall better understandings of the universal principles that underlie emotional-affective state generation and regulation.
The Epistemology of Emotional Affects
Cognitions are not the only pathway to emotional affects. Emotional bodily dynamics are more intimately intertwined with the basic affects of the brain. The subcortical localization of the basic emotional system has been dramatically confirmed by that fact that investigators can surgically eliminate all neocortex at birth in various experimental animals, and they grow up to be seemingly normal creatures as far as their basic sets of emotional energies are concerned. They exhibit exploratory urges and seeking behaviors, fear, anger, lust, maternal care, and playfulness. The last is especially surprising (Panksepp et al., 1994), since physical play is such a dynamically flexible behavior. This kind of brain damage, inflicted to adults, certainly impairs all these kinds of behaviors more severely, probably because these urges are cognitively rerepresented in the brain, to the point where there seems to be no distinction between emotions and cognitions. The retention of basic affective tendencies is also evident in young humans missing higher regions of their brains (Shewmon, et al., 1999). What this research implies is that we can work more directly with emotional feelings through body dynamics than cognitive inputs.
Affective Balance Therapies
The emotional rudiments of the mind are thoroughly biological. The guiding principle is that raw affects arise from large-scale neural networks that generate instinctual emotional behaviors, rather than from higher self-related brain regions that mediate the cognitive awareness of our existence. Since these subcortical dynamics—large-scale analog network functions—are the well-springs of emotional life, it may be useful for psychotherapists to more clearly envision the nature of these psychic energies to more effectively deal with them in therapeutic interactions. Each emotional system can be evaluated prior to and during therapy, as might be done with the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (Davis, et al., 2003).
Emotional feelings go hand in hand with emotional action dynamics and constitute distinct affective varieties of mental experience. The resulting affective dynamics have an identifiable bodily feel to them as primordial phenomenological-experiential states that we call “affective consciousness” (Panksepp, 2005b). Although these dynamics emerge from subcortical brain networks that we share with other animals, they could be recruited more effectively in psychotherapeutic environments, especially experiential–affective and body-oriented therapies, to help directly modulate how one emotionally experiences the world. As we learn to express such emotional dynamics creatively with our whole bodily apparatus, we can come to control and further explore our basic emotional feelings.
So, in a deep neurophenomenological sense, what are emotional feelings? To the best of our knowledge, emotional feelings arise from wide-scale neurodynamics that establish characteristic, mentally experienced “forces” that regulate and reflect certain types of action readiness within the nervous system. Let us briefly consider these dynamics. The distinct dynamics are evident in the pounding force of anger, the shivery feelings of fear, the caress of love, the urgent thrusting of sexuality, the painful pangs of grief, the exuberance of joy, and the persistent “nosy” poking about of organisms seeking resources. Practically the only way we can understand how mammalian brains generate raw emotional experience is by having workable (i.e., animal) neuroscience models where the necessary detailed work can be done.
It has long been known in psychological science that emotional feelings can be induced by simulating emotional actions. Often this response has been studied via facial actions, but even more dramatic effects can be achieved with whole-body dynamics (Panksepp & Gordon, 2003). How such voluntary control over affective states can be harnessed in psychotherapeutic situations remains to be studied systematically. It seems fairly straightforward to bring such affect-specific energies to bear on all varieties of experiential, affective, and body-oriented psychotherapies, what here I am calling the ABTs. These highly focused emotional exercises could contribute greatly to sensorimotor psychotherapeutic approaches (Ogden, Minton, & Pain, 2006), providing a ready opportunity to educate people about the primary-process aspects of their emotional lives.
To become a master of our emotional dynamics in this way should help pave the path toward emotional homeostasis in a variety of situations. Pursued on a daily basis, such emotional exercises may constitute a strengthening of our “emotional muscles” in ways that can counteract the effects of various past traumas and inoculate our emotional circuits against future adversities. A great deal of basic science, using appropriate methodologies (e.g., double-blind procedures) that combine cognitive–emotional interventions with existing body therapies (Ogden et al., 2006), needs to be done in this realm to evaluate the efficacy of various specific techniques. These techniques need to be studied not only in the context of interventions aimed at healing human suffering but also in terms of self-actualization for those with no urgent problems who wish to improve their humanness and mental healthiness.
Playful Affective and Body-Oriented Therapies
Play may be the most underutilized emotional force that could have remarkable benefits in psychotherapy, especially with children. There are, of course, many play therapies, but most of them are structured “fun” activities that have no resemblance to the bodily vigor, spontaneity, and creativeness of “real” physical PLAY. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that one of the main functions of PLAY circuitry is to help construct social brains (Panksepp, 2007c, 2008b). The cortex, at birth, is largely a tabula rasa that needs to be socialized under the influence of basic tools such as physical PLAY, which Mother Nature provided for the epigenetic construction of the social brain. This construction may be best achieved by utilizing PLAY to shape the many plasticities of the brain in a way that creates fine-tuned social brains that work optimally in the environments in which young animals find themselves in their struggle to mature. Psychiatric distress can be conceptualized as overturned tables that need to be set right again, and there is unlikely to be any stronger emotional aid than that contained in the joyous potentials of PLAY.
If we do not build social structures that promote joyous childhood play in our own children, we may be promoting cultural attitudes that facilitate problems such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Human children, just like rats that are not allowed safe places to exercise their urges for rough-and-tumble engagement, will develop heightened motivations to play. The likelihood of play-starved children becoming playfully impulsive within the classroom increases, as do diagnoses of children with ADHD, who, all too often, are destined to receive psychostimulants. Such drugs are among the most effective inhibitors of physical play urges. On the other hand, animal models already confirm that ADHD-type impulsivity can be reduced, in the long run, with extra rations of rough-and-tumble play throughout early development (Panksepp, et al., 2003).
Early play may be essential for the emergence of well-modulated social abilities. The use of abundant natural play in early childhood as a way to strengthen positive social affect circuits of the brain, and hence perhaps to not only provide substantial prophylaxis for ADHD but also depression, desperately needs to be investigated in large-scale sociocultural studies. Elsewhere I have proposed the development of concepts such a “play sanctuaries” for our 2-to 6-year-old preschoolers (Panksepp, 2007a, 2008b).
The same points can be made for adults. Playfulness is an underutilized “force” with which to reroute mature lives onto positive affective tracks. First, it is becoming clear that robust physical activity may be as good an antidepressant as any of the medicines that dampen emotionality (see Watt & Panksepp, 2009, for overview). Second, it seems likely that play urges in adults can be reenergized by various types of bodily activities—from dance to sports—much of it hopefully facilitated by artistic accompaniments, such as music and dance, that are partly designed around the rhythmic motor impulses of the body (Panksepp & Trevarthen, 2008). Marathon organizers, recognizing the power of such motor rhythm facilitators, are beginning to ban iPods so that music listeners will not have undue advantages over the silent plodders. Clearly, music and the other arts need to be incorporated into all therapies that are clearly concerned with the human spirit.
The flow of cognitive activities is considerably more dependent, during early life, on the lower emotional powers, when cognitive skills and ability for self-regulation remain poorly developed. It is also useful to remember that all basic emotional systems are plastic, getting sensitized (stronger) with use and desensitized (weaker) with lack of use. These two basic processes of sensitization and desensitization have many etiological implications for understanding how emotional distress can intensify and become chronic; they also may have therapeutic implications for the long-term regulation of distress as well as positive affect. For instance, depression is much more likely to occur in adults who have experienced chronic lack of support and insecurity during childhood. Children who have had a secure base internalize that security for a lifetime, a phenomenon now detailed in animals (Szyf et al., 2008). Can adult affective lives also be restructured? The massive plasticity of the brain (Doidge, 2007) suggests that this achievement is likely, albeit not to the extent as occurs during early development, when the neocortex still resembles a tabula rasa (Sur & Rubenstein, 2005).
On Treating Human Souls: Emotional Endophenotypes and Psychiatric Authenticity
Future development of ABPs can be facilitated by clearer, scientifically valid visions of how primary-process emotionality is organized within human brains, and how self-related information processing (Northoff et al., 2006; Panksepp & Northoff, 2009), within a cross-species core affective self (Northoff & Panksepp, 2008), helps program the rest of the cognitive apparatus. How do affective feelings, the neurosymbolic indicators of basic survival values, arise from neural activities? How are primary-process emotions of anger and fear, joy and sadness actually encoded within the brain? What does it mean when libidinal energies and core emotional values become imbalanced? What does it mean when excessive emotional energies permeate human souls? “Souls?” Indeed, we may need such concepts—which may be isomorphic with the affectively rich core self around which so much of our mentation revolves.
Although debatable, I suspect the biological “soul” or “core self” is a coherent and completely neurobiological process, barely studied, with its epicenter running deep in brain–mind evolution. In brief, convergent evidence suggest that we share relatively homologous ancient animalian core selves with many other creatures of the world. Because of this shared base, pet-assisted therapy can use the natural emotional vitalities of our fellow creatures to provide examples of how humans can live more joyously. We are all inheritors of core selves that are neurodynamically quite similar, to the best of our knowledge.
Such neurosymbolic representations of the organism are presumably laid out in primitive viscerosomatic coordinates concentrated in central midbrain regions, such as the PAG (Panksepp, 1998b). These body images ramify through the core of the higher brainstem to medial cingulate/frontal regions, and may be shifted into distinct emotional field dynamics (large-scale network activities that directly generate distinct types of behavioral–instinctive urgencies) by a variety of impinging neurodynamics arising from emotional command systems (Lewis, 2005). This core process for primal self-representation, which developmentally matures to permit self-related information processing, may be a source of psychic coherence that is developmentally linked to higher medial cortical rerepresentations of the more primitive core processes (Northoff et al., 2006; Northoff & Panksepp, 2008). However, with excessive and repeated emotional storms, this core of psychic stability may engender natural varieties of emotional disequilibrium.
If this vision is a reasonable approximation of core brain–mind dynamics, then the key scientific mystery of brain function that directly impacts psychotherapeutic practice and understanding becomes the neural nature of emotional feelings, especially cravings that have become manically extreme or diminished beyond levels that support normative living patterns. Such complex network dynamics are hard to see directly in cognitively regulated clients; they must be inferred by clients’ willingness to reveal their core feelings. The “bread and butter” of experiential approaches is the use of techniques designed to get through the “defenses” and the “blocks against affect” of cognitively hyperregulated patients, so as to tap into somatically based emotional experience (Fosha, 2000). A therapist will see more clearly how these dynamics are interwoven with higher cognitive information processing. However, recent advances in basic cross-species affective neuroscience, supplemented now with modern functional human brain imaging, are making clearer visions of the core issues more approachable and comprehensible (e.g., Northoff et al., 2006; Northoff & Panksepp, 2008). This area could constitute a major neuroscience contribution to the therapeutic enterprise. Much of the core knowledge has so far come from basic animal studies; of course, the cognitive ramifications must be derived from new and more sensitive human work—a psychoethology that does not yet exist.
To develop a psychoethology devoted to understanding the neural nature of affective-emotional processes, the brain-and affect-free “functionalist” cognitive revolution that came to rule psychology and gradually germinated cognitive neuroscience with the discovery of brain-imaging technologies, needs to internalize important messages from animal affective neuroscience that currently remain ignored: (1) Essentially all instinctual expressions of basic emotions remain intact after neonatal decortication. (2) Various basic emotions can be aroused from subcortical brain regions, but only by activating specific neurochemical circuits. (3) The generation of primary-process affective mentality is a subcortical, not a cortical, function of the brain. Thus, for neuroscience to provide greater assistance to biological psychiatry and psychotherapeutics, investigators need to devote as much attention to the lower affective properties of animal brains as they do to the higher cognitive aspects of human minds.
An especially important skill for a therapist is to be able situate a client properly in affective space. Our own efforts in that direction have led us to construct a new personality scale, the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale (ANPS), that offers a straightforward way to evaluate the status of clients on all of the emotional primes except LUST. “Spirituality” was added instead, since that is so important for getting people over the hump of addictive disorders as well as, more widely, for finding the path to a life well lived. The ANPS is freely available for clinical use and research (Davis et al., 2003; tests are downloadable in various languages from www.anps.de).
Since the dynamics of basic emotional systems control many affective qualities of mental life, psychotherapists need to evaluate not only where individuals lie on these emotional dimensions, as can currently be best estimated with the ANPS, but they also need to clearly envision the major emotional forces that may have become imbalanced in forms of emotional distress. Emotional endophenotypes may provide such guidance for clinicians and also for neuroscientists who wish to contribute to our emerging knowledge of raw emotional feelings (Panksepp, 2006). These affective ancestral voices of the genes arise from ancient, subcortical neurodynamics and proceed to profoundly effect (and affect) the whole cognitive apparatus. There is abundant room here not only for development of new medicines that directly target affective imbalances in specific emotional systems, but also to recruit the often latent psychological and affective resources of clients to personally counteract many of those sustained emotional storms that are currently conceptualized as psychiatric disorders.
Conclusion
As every cognitively oriented therapist knows, in adults cognitions can readily modify emotional responsivity in useful ways; to some extent that insight lies at the heart of many, if not most, psychotherapeutic approaches. But that is not really true of the bottom-up approaches featured in this book. In these approaches, insight is something that emerges as a result of therapeutic transformation; insight is not the primary agent of transformation, but rather a consequence of it. Emotional action guides perception. However, therapy is less effective if past insecurities have crystallized as a shifted sensitivity of an emotional system.
Therapists who know how to conceptualize the basic emotions as distinct control processes, and to respect the developmental power of such psychic energies, may be able to promote more lasting therapeutic change than those who seek to remain simply at the cognitive level. Therapists able to engage with clients deeply and empathically, gradually reflecting on the deeper and fluctuating emotional feelings of clients and drawing out and reframing the associated cognitions, are more likely to be helpful than individuals less skilled at working on primary-process emotional levels.
In sum, psychotherapists need to internalize a better understanding of the nature of the basic emotional energies in order to deal more effectively with those prominent factors in all psychopathological and productive psychotherapeutic equations. From the brain perspective, the nature of affect may be the most important issue not only in developing new animal models of psychiatric disorders, but in optimizing the way clinicians must conceptualize the foundational aspects of their clients’ problems. One reason that furrow of scientific understanding has not been cultivated more vigorously is because the emotional feelings of animals have been marginalized by the same scientists best positioned to do substantive work on such critically important brain issues. Regrettably few behavioral neuroscientists have envisioned how their many objective scientific approaches could illuminate the fundamental nature of affective subjectivity (Panksepp, 2005a, 2005b).
As we continue to cultivate this furrow of understanding—the cross-species understanding of primary-process emotional systems—we may be in a much better position to facilitate restoration of affective homeostasis through not only new mind medicines but through our understanding of how old feelings can be integrated into new cognitive structures. Scientifically, an understanding of the “whole” psychic apparatus can only be achieved gradually through a thorough understanding of both the neuronal and psychological “parts”—at both affective and cognitive levels of mind–brain organization.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Diana Fosha for valuable editorial advice. This work was partly supported by the Hope for Depression Research Foundation.