The Emotional Foundations of Personality

by Kenneth L Davis

  The initial fear response is an example of a prediction, made largely by the subcortical brain, namely, that you are in danger—spotlighting an immediate survival issue. Your brain made this prediction automatically without any conscious analysis or effort on your part. As a result of this ancestral prediction, your brain concurrently created a fearful emotion and motivated a specific type of action. Regardless of how relaxed and pleasant you were feeling as you were enjoying your hike, this fearful event charged your whole being with strong emotion and set in place many bodily reactions, including the compelling urge to move away, to seek safety, without needing any intervening cognitive reflections.

  This scenario is an example of an evolved response pattern—a prime mover—that helps us avoid physical harm to our bodies. This response pattern does not need to be learned. Somehow, all primates, indeed most mammals, not just humans, are instinctively afraid of snakes and have subcortical brains innately equipped to identify snakes as life-threatening dangers. From a personality perspective, once your brain has made the prediction that there is a dangerous snake in your path, it sets off a series of adaptive actions and feelings to ensure your safety and even survival. The feeling may temporally lag the action, prior to conditioning, but it is still an unconditioned flight response of our FEAR/Anxiety system (more on this below) that probably evolved as a mental heuristic, which can extend an anticipatory attitude in time and space. The brain mechanisms that generate such valenced feelings may constitute what behaviorists, without any perceived need for brain research, called reinforcements (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).

  In any event, FEAR (the use of all caps indicates a formal name for an evolved emotional brain system) is an example of one of the primary movers, one of the evolved elements in the mammalian brain that can break our behavioral inertia and excite our entire being to action. As you walked along the path, you were probably not actively looking for snakes. However, your vigilant brain spied the animal and automatically set off a series of adaptive responses that included sparking you to action. Your action was not set off by conscious intention—it was instinctive and reflexive. And it also felt like something and hence can be used as a model for those “ancestral voices” that move us out of our resting state into active coherent behavior.

  This example briefly illustrated the brain’s FEAR system. A key part of this emotional system being aroused is the feeling of fear. Somehow, our subcortical brain has evolved a way for us to experience this feeling of fear as strongly aversive, even punishing, something to terminate as soon as possible. The FEAR emotion was not learned. In some manner that is yet to be fully understood, it is built in as part of our brain’s intrinsic tools for living so that the primary feeling of fear itself never fundamentally changes over the course of our entire lives, even though it can come to be regulated in space, time, and intensity as it becomes associated with various life events. FEAR also never loses its capacity to provoke an urge to act, even though at less intense levels of arousal FEAR can motivate us to “freeze” in place.

  The arousal of the FEAR system alters our thoughts and perceptions as well. After seeing a dangerous snake on the trail and being intensely frightened, we will likely become more cognitively attuned to spotting snakes. We may even spot a snake when there is no snake, just a tree branch on the trail that looks a little like a snake. Likewise, our minds may fill with thoughts about venomous snakes we have read about or heard about on television, some with venom that can kill in a very short time. We may recall vague memories about how to recognize the distinctive diamond-shaped head of most poisonous snakes. We may also make plans of what to do if actually bitten by a snake and vow to come better prepared if ever hiking this trail, or any potential snake habitat, again.

  Many kinds of learning can be motivated by this system, but the important point is that FEAR is an example of a prime mover, one of the archetypal emotional brain systems that strongly shape our behavior and, for our purposes here, define aspects of our personality usually measured in humans by asking appropriate questions (i.e., personality tests).

  Life is full of fear-provoking situations. Importantly for a discussion of personality, some of us are more sensitive than others to these fear-provoking events. Some would feel quite apprehensive about venturing into a forest in the first place. Few have the courage to attempt rock climbing up the steep side of El Capitan at Yosemite (the fifth ever “free ascent” was completed by Jorg Verhoeven in 2014). Indeed, some would intensely dislike walking through a strange part of town, especially at night, and especially alone. On the other hand, others of us are not so easily frightened and are much less likely to be inhibited by such challenges. It is these kinds of emotional differences that give rise to unique personalities by motivating and guiding our diverse action tendencies so consistently from day to day. These individual differences in the sensitivities of our emotional brain systems lead each of us to experience the world differently and therefore to respond differently, resulting in our recognizable individual personalities. To varying degrees, depending to a great extent on our inherited makeup, our emotions move us out of our resting state. They are the prime movers of personality.

  PRIME MOVERS ALSO GUIDE LEARNING

  Importantly, these instinctive emotional brain systems are not fixed and immutable. Again, using the FEAR system as an example, while the feeling of fear itself does not change, what we fear does change. Indeed, the FEAR system, like each of our brain’s emotion systems, learns spontaneously without any conscious effort on our part. The feeling of fear can be psychologically very punishing; still, fear is an important part of how we learn to adapt to a changing world. Although we have no innate fear of knives, we quickly learn knives can cut our skin and injure our bodies, but we also learn to use such tools as we need to cut into things. And, of course, we naturally learn how dangerous knives can be in the hands of a menacing individual who wants to hurt us. We can also learn less fearful responses to snakes. We can learn how ecologically beneficial snakes are in the control of rodents, and we can learn how to pin a snake’s head with a forked stick and handle it safely, and even “milk” the venom out of its fangs—a skill surely acquired more readily by those who begin life with a less arousable FEAR system. Such lack of fearfulness can be inherited, along with the variations in all the other basic emotions, as has been indicated by abundant selective breeding research in animals.

  So, in addition to being our motivators and guides, emotions are also our teachers. There are other primary emotional affects, such as the pleasant, warm feelings we experience when we care for babies and help others in need. Collectively, the punishing and rewarding qualities of these primary emotional affects help us learn about the idiosyncrasies of the world. They are the rewards and punishments that help us adapt to an ever-changing environment. Without these pleasant and unpleasant affects—the learning-facilitating function of our primary emotions, we might be locked into acting as if we continued to live in the ecological niche our ancestors evolved in. We would function like fruit flies that instinctively fly toward the light regardless of whether that light is the sun or an ultraviolet insect trap. Unlike coyotes, we would be unable to learn to avoid killing and eating sheep in areas where farmers bait coyotes with dead sheep carcasses laced with nauseating chemicals. And, unlike the proverbial fox, we would never learn to take advantage of the fact that humans have also domesticated the chicken.

  Our primal emotional strengths and weaknesses endow us with the foundation of our various human personalities, beginning with an inherited base, which is adapted in many ways as we mature and learn from life experiences. We experience our emotions at various affective levels, from subtle moods shifts to full-blown RAGE or PANIC reactions. They are always ready to move us to action, and it is these ancestral emotions, evolved over millions of years, that we must learn more about to better understand why we act and feel and generally experience the world as we do. These systems are the foundations of our personality structures,
but a great deal of complexity is added by learning—to a point where we can assess human personalities by simply asking the right psychological assessment questions, rather than having to focus merely on large-scale bodily behaviors, vocalizations, and various autonomic responses of our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

  THE BASIC STUDY OF EMOTIONS

  Jaak Panksepp, the second author, recognized early in his career that powerful emotional drivers such as desire, anger, fear, and feelings of loneliness were keys to understanding our personality differences and even the sources of some of our major psychopathologies, especially mania, excessive anger, anxiety disorders, and depression. As a result, in the mid-1960s he began his psychological research in the nascent specialty of physiological psychology, exploring the subcortical emotional systems embedded in the evolutionarily older parts of our brains—a field founded on the work of Walter Hess starting in the late 1920s, with Paul MacLean adding important observations a generation later, names we will revisit shortly. With the technical tools that were emerging to study the actual workings of the brain, especially deep brain stimulation (DBS), Panksepp began to study the mammalian brain and its evolved emotional systems.

  Panksepp first described four distinct brain emotion systems, SEEKING (a generalized form of appetitive-exploratory-foraging desire), RAGE (anger), FEAR, and PANIC (aka separation distress), weaving them into one of the first global psychobiological theories of emotions (Panksepp, 1982). However, he shortly realized that there were at least three more of these blue ribbon systems: sexual LUST, maternal CARE, and juvenile PLAY. We believe that these subcortical brain emotion systems are the tools nature has evolved to move us to action and, with the possible exception of LUST, form the emotional drivers that lie at the foundation of our personalities and psychopathologies.

  Early on, personality theorists including Sigmund Freud and Gordon Allport also realized there had to be biological mechanisms underlying our personalities and psychological imbalances—“neurophysiological brain causes” in the case of Freud and “psychophysiological systems” in the case of Allport. But, as impressive as their careers were, technology had not yet provided psychological researchers with the experimental tools for studying such brain intricacies. So, despite their interest in the biological explanations of personality, both Freud and Allport chose to pursue psychological analyses along with clinical therapeutic approaches to understanding human behavior.

  A great many investigators laid the foundations for and have contributed to our slowly accelerating efforts to understand emotions and other feelings, which with modern human brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography studies; see Chapter 16) has now reached a fever pitch. However, two pioneers, Walter Hess in the first third of the twentieth century and Paul MacLean in the second third, were especially eminent in advancing neuroscientific approaches to tease out parts of the emotional puzzles encapsulated in the subcortical regions of mammalian brains. Hess explored the technique of probing ancient areas deep in the center of the brain with DBS—tiny electric currents to reveal what areas were linked to specific emotional responses such as rage/anger. MacLean pursued an evolutionary approach to the “limbic” anatomy of the brain. He envisioned the brain to be a layered organ with more evolutionarily recent areas (neocortex) surrounding middle layers (the basal ganglia, or “limbic system,” as he called it), layered on top of even more evolutionarily ancient areas (the upper brain stem, consisting of thalamus, hypothalamus, and midbrain), which guided the actions of the lower brain stem and spinal cord.

  The “limbic” approach to emotions, although not much used by modern neuroscientists, described areas in the human brain that could be traced to “lower” mammals, from monkeys and rats to even reptiles and fish. One could actually see the work of evolutionary changes within the brain, much more than any other bodily organ. There were newer mammalian structures (cortex) layered on top of old mammalian ones (limbic system), with reptilian foundations still evident as investigators studied all species they could lay their hands on.

  There were also evolutionarily more recent areas of the cortex that were indeed unique to humans, and ever since the philosopher-psychologist William James wrote his remarkable Principles of Psychology in the late nineteenth century and speculated that feelings emerged from our higher neocortical brain regions, many psychologists (even some neuroscientists who should know better) have speculated that our emotional feelings arise from cortical activities—brain regions that are critical for our ability to think. But they are wrong, even as it is clear that those higher brain regions can regulate our behaviors and thinking in ways that most other animals cannot imagine.

  Panksepp blended these clinical therapeutic and neuroscientific evolutionary traditions utilizing additional neuroscience tools such as precise pharmacological methods to continue picking the lock on what some called the “black box,” a metaphor for the brain intended to suggest the futility of exploring the deeper biological causes of behavior hidden in the brain itself. Indeed, the neuroscience revolution had begun in the early twentieth century, and tantalizing questions could begin to be asked—even though all answers are provisional—questions that often suggested additional questions, many of which cannot yet be answered. In any event, many, many more generations of enthusiastic empirical brain investigators will undoubtedly be required to generate fully satisfactory answers to the secrets of human behavior and the various instinctive and learned drivers of our individual personalities.

  However, in this volume we make the case that the primal brain processes that control our affective arousals, so important for constructing learning and memory, can provide a foundational understanding of our personalities. Thus, the seven blue ribbon emotions (Grade A evolutionary prizes all mammals inherit) ——illuminated by the work of Panksepp and his colleagues (perhaps excluding LUST from the list of seven) provide an experimentally verifiable theory of shared personality foundations in both humans and other animals: they are the prime movers of our interactions with our world that shape our personalities. Even the word emotion itself suggests such an approach. The etymological roots of emotion are “out” plus “move” or “to move out”—for our purposes, to move out of a resting state into diverse and coherent adaptive behaviors that, based on millions of years of evolution, have a high probability of dealing effectively with whatever life-challenging events we are facing. Emotions provide an affectively rich action readiness, along with thought and memory facilitation, that helps structure what kind of individual we become based on both heredity and individual life trajectories.

  ENCAPSULATED AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE THEORY OF PERSONALITY

  The affective neuroscience theory of personality proposes that we are born with various endophenotypes: primary emotional-affective personality profiles generated initially from our individual genomes. That is, our personalities arise through our endophenotypes, which are constructed from these primal emotional brain systems that provide our capacities not only to act but also to act consistently over time, without needing any conscious effort on our part, and that also promote affectively regulated patterns of learning and memory, allowing for diverse adaptations to life events.

  Our primary emotions with their built-in affects and reaction tendencies can be thought of as birthright survival systems. In urgent survival situations, they move us to react in ways that have worked effectively for countless generations of ancestors. In less urgent situations they still bias our perceptions and actions, generate both constant and coherent streams of thoughts, and add value and meaning to our experiences through the positive and negative feelings they generate. Our primary emotions begin as unconditional responses (the behaviorist term for instincts) to stimuli arising from life-challenging circumstances, but they are continuously revamped as they control and guide learning, and hence memory formations and retrievals—brain mechanisms that also operate automatically, but in those cases completely unconsc
iously. In addition, emotional arousals always have feeling states associated with them, which may be the first form of consciousness that emerged on the face of the earth (Panksepp, 2007a, 2009), providing a solid foundation for all the rest (Panksepp, 2015; Solms & Panksepp, 2012).

  Along with learning and memories, these emotional systems guide our behavior over a lifetime in ways that are sufficiently consistent that each of us can be accurately described by personality dimensions—our personal endophenotype. Our developing endophenotype is sufficiently complex that we are not completely predictable. Yet, there is a day-to-day sameness in our behavioral interchanges with the other humans, animals, objects, and circumstances we encounter that our endophenotypes provide: a modus operandi that is recognizable to those around us such that others will remark when we are “not being ourselves,” “out of sorts,” or “just acting,” so to speak.

  Why do we do anything at all, let alone in a consistent way that is recognizable to all who know us well? It is our primary-process psychobehavioral abilities, our prime movers, that arise from our subcortical brain’s primary emotional action systems that move us out of our resting state into coherent behavior patterns, which if adequately understood could be seen as our endophenotype’s optimal ways of trying to cope with life challenges, with further refinements being added by our learning mechanisms and thereby individual memories.