On The Seven Basic Emotional Systems Of Panksepp. Overview

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Jak Panksepp is an American scientist originally from Estonia. In my opinion, his studies of the emotional systems of primates are very important for understanding not only the basics of neuropsychoanalysis, but also for any work related to psychology, both clinical and academic. There are many theories and hypotheses about emotions, sometimes directly opposite to each other, but for the most part, they are constructed using a top-down method. There are works by Ekman on the universality of facial expressions for certain emotions. There is some confusion of emotion with the concept of "mood" (mood). The Panksepp system is built on experiments with animals and, in essence, developed in the opposite way - from the bottom up, that is, from neuroanatomy and specific experiments to the general theory of primate emotions. Each of these basic systems has its own neuroanatomy and its own chemistry. Panksepp's system integrates well with neuropsychoanalysis, as you can read about in more detail in Solms.

In this text, I will provide a brief overview of Panksepp's systems based on his interviews. I will write in more detail about some of these systems later. For me personally, this is very useful information. I think that ignorance of these basic systems, which are not only in humans, but also in other primates, often leads to "blind shooting" and theorizing, divorced from the reality of the central organ in which mental processes take place - the brain.

List of systems:

SEEKING

RAGE (rage)

FEAR (fear)

LUST

CARE (care)

PANIC / GRIEF (panic / grief)

PLAY (game)

Below is a translation and transcript of an excerpt of the interview, starting at 16 minutes.

I put them in this order on purpose. I put Search as the first system. It is the largest and most versatile emotional system. And that's a good name for what Olds and Milner called the reward system. This system obviously rewards, but not at all with pleasure, at least in our usual understanding of pleasure as a sensory sensation, that is, for example, the feeling that we experience when we eat sugar, or vice versa when we perceive bitter food with a negative sensation. We have a variety of sensory experiences that lead to pleasure or displeasure. These are not emotions. These are affects. Affect is a general term for valence sensation. From my point of view, we have three types of valence sensations. (1) Sensory sensations that come to us from the outside world; (2) sensations occurring in the body, that is, homeostatic affects (hunger and thirst) originating inside the body (we have specialized receptors in the brain for these sensations); and finally, we have affects going on inside the brain - the most subtle of all affects, which I call Emotional Affects. The most primitive of these is the Search system, since it serves as a general resource discovery function. To survive, an animal needs to look for and find resources, and to do it quite energetically, with enthusiasm. The actual feeling produced by this system, if we take the highest point, is euphoria. In a more moderate form, enthusiasm. The animal actively interacts with the world and gets involved in this interaction. It is a general system for finding all the required resources.

Often you have to compete for resources with other animals. One good way to do this is to be angry. Therefore, we have the Rage system that allows us to protect our resources. Other animals sometimes want to use us as a resource, and we need to protect ourselves. We have a Fear system that produces a characteristic response - fear. Besides, being a mammal is about reproducing, and we do not leave this important function to chance. As a result, we have the Lust system. This system is significantly different for men and women, although there are common components. The function of lust is to give birth to offspring and prolong life in the next generation.

As a consequence, the brain must be ready to take care of the baby, which is why we have the Care system. Many people have researched the sexuality and maternal behavior of animals. I will not talk about this in detail now. When you have a baby, then he must have some kind of communication system in order to tell his mother how much he needs her, especially if he feels that he is alone. Therefore, we began to study the separation-distress system. We studied it by observing the crying of babies temporarily distant from their mothers. We identified the neural circuits associated with this system and called this Panic system. We sometimes call it the Panic / Grief system as people often don’t understand why we called it “Panic”. We named it that because we assume that, in a psychiatric sense, a disorder of this system is the basis of Panic Attacks (PA). Moreover, as you know, this system is not the basis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD - Generalized Anxiety Disorder) - the Fear system has more to do with this disorder.

Finally, we were very surprised when we asked ourselves what other systems exist at the level of the primary process and found an answer to it (primary process - Freud's term). Someone said disgust. But disgust is a homeostatic sensation (that is, it belongs to the 2nd class of Panksepp's affects and is not Emotion in his system - approx. AT). Disgust is the body's attempt to remove toxic substances from the body. In addition, we use this feeling symbolically, for example as social disgust. Someone else said - dominance should be primary. But we didn't find it in brain stimulation experiments. Most likely, dominance is an acquired trait, it is learned. If it were "built into the system", then animals could not adaptively compete with each other and win; or it's a purely genetic problem. But someone else said that maybe Play is a fundamental process in the brain? And we decided to experimentally create "hunger for play" in young animals - we placed them one by one and then together, conducted various experiments. What do you think, they showed an excellent sequence of the game, very dynamic, very rich and very positive. Initially, we had problems finding the neurological correlation of this process. In one study, we decided to remove the entire neo-cortex to see if it was needed in the game; the answer was unequivocal - no. An animal without a cortex at all plays completely normal. (The host is amazing!) Panksepp - Yes! Play is an amazing emotion that leads us to social life and helps us explore the social world. I think this is the fundamental function of the Game. Primates cannot get all social rules genetically. Therefore, they must have a system that allows them to learn about the social world when they are young and to feel joy while doing it. It seems that the Game system fulfills this function.

Panksepp's interiors:

www.shrinkrapradio.com/images/329-The-Emotional-Foundation-of-Mind-with-Jaak-Panksepp2.mp3

Panksepp's books:

The Archeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology), Jaak Panksepp, Lucy Biven

Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Series in Affective Science) Jaak Panksepp

Textbook of Biological Psychiatry. Jaak Panksepp