7 Core Emotion System of Affective Neuroscience, Dr. Jaak Panksepp
Note: Many notes on this page, and I think the near totality of the quotes, are pulled from Dr Grandin's fascinating first chapter of Animals Make Us Human, which is available online to read here.
I've also picked up Panksepp and Biven's Archaeology of Mind and will likely be using that as well to fluff out the concepts noted here.
(Also this page is a big WIP mess don't yell at me for it being unfinished thank you, thank you 🍵 ✌️)
The ancient subcortical regions of the mammalian brain contain at least seven basic affective systems:
The 7 core systems are the following:
Dr. Jaak Panksepp (...) calls the core emotion systems the “blue-ribbon emotions,” because they “generate well-organized behavior sequences that can be evoked by localized electrical stimulation of the brain.” This means that when you stimulate the brain systems for one of the core emotions, you always get the same behaviors from the animal. If you stimulate the anger system, the animal snarls and bites. If you stimulate the fear system, the animal freezes or runs away. (...) When you stimulate these parts of the brain in people, they don’t snarl and bite, but they report the same emotions animals show.
People and animals (and possibly birds) are born with these emotions — they don’t learn them from their mothers or from the environment — and neuroscientists know a fair amount about how they work inside the brain. (Dr Grandin)
As Dr Grandin summarizes:
SEEKING is a combination of emotions people usually think of as being different: wanting something really good, looking forward to getting something really good, and curiosity, which most people probably don’t think of as being an emotion at all
What I like most about thinking about SEEKING as a core impulse is that seeking is tied with our understanding and love of novelty. It's self-reinforcing, "self-stimulating" in Dr Grandin's own words. I think of it especially with regards to my ability to hyper-focus on a topic and become all-consumed by my pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Dr Jaak Panksepp writes that SEEKING is like a “generalized platform for the expression of many of the basic emotional processes...It is the one system that helps animals anticipates all types of rewards.” In other words, SEEKING is what keeps us going. In Dr Grandin's understanding, SEEKING feels good, and should be understood as a positive emotional motivator or driver, it is however possible that SEEKING could include negative emotions as well.
We think that depression is an under-active seeking urge that has been made under-active by too much psychological pain. We know that all the neural systems are still there, so our goal is to invigorate the primitive seeking urge to provide a positive affect to fight the negative pain. That’s what we’re gonna try. (Dr Panskepp in 2012 in an interview with Discover Magazine)