Affective NeurosciencebyJaak Panksepp
Humans and other animals Much of behavioral control is
elaborated by unconscious brain processes
Both animals and humans have similar affective feelings that guide their behavior tendencies
So, analysis of animal emotions provide new insights in the functional organization of all mammalian brains
The simplest ways to learn about feelings:
To study human affective experience across individuals and cultures
To study animal emotive behavior To analyze animal's and human’s
brain circuits from which feelings arise (including brain stimulation and self-stimulation)
Why animals are better then humans for studying emotions?
Animal’s behavior is more emotional because it is less influenced by neocortex
More freedom for experiments Human’s descriptions are rather
interfere then help…
Emotion and languageSome reasons why human words lie to us about our inner
world: Language emerged evolutionally as an especially
effective way for encoding the relationships among external, not internal (so, not emotional) events
One can verbalize only conscious content Transcription of experience into verbal symbols distort
reality Our two hemispheres have different emotional and
cognitive perspectives, and left hemisphere (that speaks to others) may be more adept in lying and less emotional
Evolutionary aspects – truine brain conception
Reptilian brain:
•Basic motor plans
•Primitive emotions (seeking, fear, aggression, sexuality)
Paleomammalian brain – LS:
•More sofisticated variants of reptilian emotions and appearance of social emotions
Neomammalian brain – Neocortex:
•Cognitive/relational apprehension of the outside world
Schematic representation in the human brain of the major axes of visceral and somatic processing, with their convergence in reptilian brain (basal ganglia)_____________________________________________
Issues of emotion research
What are the underlying brain circuits, in anatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological terms
How emotional feelings emerge from neurodynamics of many interacting brain systems
What is emotional self
Historical aspectsClassical psychoanalysis :
our feeling and thoughts are everything,our biology does not matter
(conceptually enriched, scientifically impoverished)
Radical behaviorism:our feeling and thoughts do not matter,
our behavior is a set of learned responses
Ways of viewing the role of emotions in behavior
Basic premises Emotional abilities are instinctual
(hardwired) As much emotive systems mature and
interact with higher brain areas (and between themselves?) where they undergo both re-representation and refinement, organisms learn to make effective behavioral choices in order to effectively survive and propagate
Different emotional tendencies emerge at different developmental states
Subjective emotional experiences (feelings)
Fundamental property of emotional command systems Not epiphenomena but important causal factor in mental
life Not immaterial but true product of specific types of
neural circuits interactions Govern unconditional behavioral outputs May directly mediate learning by coding behavioral
strategies for future use May indirectly mediate learning by interacting with “self-
representational” system in brain Instinctual, i.e. genetically ingrained evolutional learning
The major premises of Affective Neuroscience about feelings
Emotional processes, including subjectively experienced feelings, play a key role in animal and human behavior
Feeling not only sustain unconditioned behaviors but also help to learn new ones
Feelings provide simple value-coding mechanisms related to “the self”
Feelings arise from the interactions of various emotional systems with the brain fundamental substrates of “the self”
When feelings continue at low level for extended periods of time, they generate mood and personality dimensions (tendency to be happy, irritable, melancholic, etc)
Emotion and cognition Clear distinction between affective and cognitive
processes exists, at least in the low reaches Primary substrates of emotionality are subcortical
(able to generate feelings without cortex) Emotions are precognitively organized Emotions are far more rigid then cognition (though
exhibit plasticity – it is interesting to what extend?) Cortex was evolutionally built upon preexisting
subcortical structures (including emotive systems) One of important functions of sophisticated and
flexible cortical organization is to overtake rigidity of emotional systems
It is impossible to understand cortical functions (ratio) with no understanding of emotional systens
Neural interactions elaborate a variety of distinct periconscious states that has little intrinsic cognitive resolution except various feelings of “goodness” or “badness”
As a result of mental maturation, those periconscious affective systems inform our higher cognitive apparatus how world events relate to our intrinsic needs (gradually establishing our higher value system)
Definition of emotional systems1. Capable of elaboration of subjective feeling states
that are affectively valenced2. Various sensory stimuli can unconditionally access
them3. Can generate instinctual motor output4. Can modulate sensory input5. Can modulate cognitive activities6. Can be modulated by cognitive input7. Can sustain emotional response after precipitating
events have passed8. Interaction of emotional systems with circuits for
self-presentation - affective consciousness???
Criteria for defining basic emotional systems
1. Valence of feeling2. Underlying neural system3. Character peripheral and expressive
changes of the body
Basic emotional systemsMore primitive:
1. SEEKING2. RAGE3. FEAR4. PANIC
Also,5. LUST6. PLAY7. CARE
Evolutionary aspects – truine brain conception
Reptilian brain:
•Basic motor plans
•Primitive emotions (seeking, fear, aggression, sexuality)
Paleomammalian brain – LS:
•More sofisticated variants of reptilian emotions and appearance of social emotions
Neomammalian brain – Neocortex:
•Cognitive/relational apprehension of the outside world
Biological unfolding of emotions
Variety of human emotions Affective-cognitive interplay? Intermixture of several emotions? Social-labeling processing? Or perhaps totally new emotional systems
as a result of human brain evolution???
It is likely that our more subtle feelings are the result of mushrooming of the cortex, but it is unlikely that they could exist without subcortical structures provided “raw feelings”
Primitive SELF-Consciousness Ineffable feeling of experiencing oneself as
an active agent in the perceived events of the world
As it emerged early in brain evolution, it should be within brainstem
Consists of reverberating neural networks linked to basic body tone and gross axial movement generators
Rooted in low-level brain circuits that first represented the body as intrinsic and coherent whole
SELF
Interaction between body schema and incoming stimuli (both external and
internal)↓
New kinds of reafferent reverberations↓
Internal state of affective awareness
SELF Has concrete neuroanatomical,
neurochemical, and neurophysiological characteristics
Richly connected to the rest of the brain, both higher and lower areas, presumably more richly than any other area of the brain stem
Should be multimodal, allowing for rerepresentation at many levels of neuroaxis and during different ontogenic stages
Rooted first in ancient midbrain regions where neural motor maps (body schema), sensory maps (world schema), and emotional maps (value schema) first intermixed
SELF
Became more and more sophisticated in the course of both ontogeny and phylogeny (due to reshaping of original form and addition of new layers of neural control, esp. higher layers)
Fully developed SELF-consciousness is an hierarchical but recursive set of neural processors
And where exactly???
Nobody knows…
Deep cerebellar nuclei?
)receive a great deal of sensory & emotional information and control
body movements(
Centromedial zones of midbrain?
(deep layers of colliculi and
periaqueductal gray)
Elaboration of basic emotional processes
Why them?
Deeper layers of colliculi: Constitute a basic motor system of the body Interact with visual, auditory, vestibular, somatosensory
systems Interact with nearby PAG
PAG: Elaborates a visceral-type map of the body Elaborates all basic emotional systems except PLAY Elaborates pain
Thank
you