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