Anticipatory Versus Consummatory Enjoyment: SEEKING
In Expression, Darwin does not directly discuss curious exploration or the seeking out of resources such as food. He does, however, discuss a critical element of the SEEKING system in distinguishing between the joys of anticipation and consumption. He wrote, “It is chiefly the anticipation of a pleasure, and not its actual enjoyment, which leads to purposeless and extravagant movements of the body, and to the utterance of various sounds” (Darwin 1872/1998, p. 80). His examples here were the excitement associated with anticipating an event, for example, children clapping their hands and jumping for joy or dogs barking and bounding when they see their food arriving. This reference to the anticipation of a pleasure is significant because the primary-process SEEKING/Enthusiasm (“brain reward”) emotional system of affective neuroscience features both the anticipation of and search for rewards, but not the consumption or enjoyment phase of reward (as was once thought). A very similar conclusion was later reached by Kent Berridge (2004). In addition, the SEEKING system may also energize other emotions, as in anticipating the termination of negative affects, such as SEEKING safety in a FEARful situation.
SUMMATION OF DARWIN’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO UNDERSTANDING HUMAN EMOTIONS
In affective neuroscience terms, Darwin had described elements of the RAGE/Anger (hatred and anger), FEAR (fear and terror), PANIC/Sadness (weeping and grief), CARE (love and the tender feelings), and PLAY (joy). If we include Darwin’s discussion of anticipatory motivation as representing the SEEKING system, his revolutionary synthesis of human and animal emotions covered all six of the primary-process emotions prominently related to personality and measured in the ANPS.
In a sense, a reasonably definitive modern personality theory (as is modeled in the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales discussed in this book) could be conceptualized as having started with Darwin’s insights (even though, as we later describe, only William McDougall carried such an approach to personality into the twentieth century). Darwin placed humans on a continuum with other mammals and used the comparative approach to identify commonalities—homologous expressions of emotions—between humans and other mammals. Using this comparative approach he frequently illuminated profound human-animal continuities, for example, both humans and other animals baring their teeth when angry and with hairs standing erect when fearful. Because the human evolutionary “ascent” was gradual, being able to trace behavioral as well as physical and psychological elements in humans back through our evolutionary history was the rule rather than the exception. The differences between humans and their nonhuman ancestors would be of degree and not of kind, and primal emotional feelings could still lie at the root of human experience.
Darwin not only established the evolutionary link between the behavior of humans and other animals; he also asserted that we are less likely to deceive ourselves if the behaviors we study can be observed in other animals as well as in humans. While Darwin did not use the term personality, he did describe the personality elements of many animals—especially chimpanzees—as well as humans. While one should remain aware of the dangers of anthropomorphizing animal behavior—giving animals human characteristics—ever since Darwin it has been equally dangerous to assume that humans are so unique that our personality structures lack counterparts in the animal kingdom.
One of the themes of this book is how our evolved biological emotional systems influence our behavior and personalities. We believe, the preponderance of evidence will continue to show that Darwin got inquiries into the sources of personality off to a remarkably clear, but typically unacknowledged, start. His focus on the comparative animal study of emotion is one of the main tenets of affective neuroscience. However, there was a long period when Darwin’s Expression was out of favor in the world of psychology, which started to be reversed a bit when Paul Ekman, who took a Darwinian approach to the study of human facial emotional expressions, published an annotated version of Darwin’s Expression in 1998.
Regrettably, today there are still those who conclude that the subjective experience of emotions is unique to humans, or simply cannot be empirically studied in animal models. Both views are simply incorrect, and it is time to return classic emotion approaches to the study of human temperaments, a goal we strive for with this book. Therefore, we not only summarize the history of the field but also highlight how the ANPS is a bridge toward a further synthesis of human and animal data through a new comparative neuropsychology that is essential for understanding the foundations of the human mind. As we describe in the next chapter, the life work of William McDougall attempted this, even though his work currently seems to be a footnote to an intellectual passage that never happened, at least until the emergence of an empirically sound affective neuroscience.
CHAPTER 4
William McDougall’s Comparative Psychology
Toward a Naturalistic Personality Approach
It is only a comparative and evolutionary psychology that can provide the needed basis [for understanding human nature]; and this could not be created before the work of Darwin had convinced men of the continuity of human with animal evolution as regards all bodily characters, and had prepared the way for the quickly following recognition of the similar continuity of man’s mental evolution with that of the animal world.
—William McDougal, Introduction to Social Psychology
WITH CHARLES DARWIN’S evolutionary perspective, it was not long until a young British psychologist, William McDougall (1871–1938), applied Darwin’s ideas to construct a more formal theory of human personality by focusing on the emerging wisdom embodied in the comparative approach. Relying on cross-species observations, McDougall arrived at a list of primary emotions that were quite similar to those of Darwin, as well as more recent psychologists like Silvan Tomkins and his students Paul Ekman and Cal Izard, as well as Jaak Panksepp’s independent neuroscience work, which was purposefully constrained by a direct study of the brains of other animals. The reason Panksepp studied animal brains was straightforward: We simply do not have access to the relevant brain mechanisms in human research.
MCDOUGALL AND THE INSTINCT THEORY OF PERSONALITY
William McDougall, a now largely forgotten psychologist, was born in England in 1871, in the same year that The Descent of Man was published. With his interest in the evolution of mind, McDougall became one of the earliest British psychologists in the newly emerging academic field of social psychology, and he accepted the “doctrine of the evolution of man from animal forms” (McDougall, 1908, p. 76). In 1904 he took a position at Oxford, where he wrote what turned out to be his most famous work, Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), which led to his being offered the William James chair of psychology at Harvard in 1920, ten years after James died. With his Introduction to Social Psychology (from here on referred to as ISP), McDougall had published one of the most thorough analyses of emotions ever attempted and how these important brain processes may relate to personality. However, in the United States he was greeted by a tidal wave of behaviorism and later wrote, “I found Behaviorism ascendant and rampant. I found that, though my Social Psychology had enjoyed before the War a much larger vogue than I had realized, it and I were now back-numbers, relics of a bygone and superseded age” (McDougall, 1930, p. 213). History can be cruel when in our estimation we are on the right track but without a receptive audience. Therefore, while at Harvard, McDougall shifted directions and spent many years attempting to demonstrate Lamarckian transmission (the inheritance of acquired traits) in rats, without success (McDougall, 1930). Of course, this was difficult without access to modern genetics.3
Indeed, he was quite frustrated at Harvard, because he did not get the adulation he thought he deserved. In 1927 he moved to Duke University, where he remained until his death in 1938. In his autobiography, he described himself as arrogant, and he admitted to being attracted to grand projects. At Duke he pursued “psychical research” (now known as parapsychology) with the hope of determin
ing for the world whether “supernormal phenomena” could be experimentally verified. Parenthetically, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), a British naturalist who had shared his own prescient theory of evolution with Darwin in 1858 (which speeded Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species), like McDougall also spent much of the rest of his career studying paranormal phenomena. Even though these research activities tarnished both their reputations, McDougall felt he had pursued them with the same scientific rigor that he had applied earlier to comparative psychology.
Nevertheless, it is McDougall’s earlier comparative personality work, which was written just before the advent of Watsonian radical behaviorism, that was his major contribution and that we summarize in this chapter as an example of a prebehaviorism comparative approach to understanding the workings of the mammalian mind, with implications for understanding the sources of human personality differences. Remarkably, Panksepp independently took up this quest to understand basic mammalian emotions—shifting from clinical psychology to physiological psychology in his first year of graduate school as he realized there was no other way to constitutionally understand evolved emotional feelings in humans without the neuroscience essential to take understanding to the “mechanistic” level (for a neurophilosophical synopsis of the rationale, see Panksepp, 2015).
McDougall’s Social Psychology: Toward Instinct Criteria for Personality Traits
McDougall’s best-known work, Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), was based on “the sweeping assertion that the energy displayed in every human activity might in principle be traced back to some inborn disposition or instinct” (McDougall, 1930, p. 208). However, his contribution is more than just formalizing Darwin’s evolutionary ideas about emotions into a personality theory. McDougall also placed each personality-related emotion and its psychopathological extreme on the same dimension, a concept that modern psychiatry is still struggling to introduce into diagnostic practice (see Panksepp, 2005, 2008). McDougall further detailed key components of primary emotions, more comprehensively than Darwin, that continue to withstand the test of time, namely, scientific scrutiny from both human psychological (Izard, 2007) and cross-species neuroscientific perspectives (Panksepp, 1998a, 2005, 2011b).
Since the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution, hundreds if not thousands of instincts had been proposed by many authors, and along with them McDougall was widely criticized for excessive use of the instinct concept. In reality, McDougall was himself critical of those that used the instinct concept loosely. Thus, McDougall placed limiting criteria on the identification of instincts and rejected proposed instincts that did not meet his standards.
The first criterion, like Darwin, was whether certain “natural” behaviors were “clearly displayed in the instinctive activities of the higher animals” (McDougall, 1908, p. 42). That is, he was only willing to consider “primary emotions” or “simple instincts” that could be observed in humans as well as other vertebrates. With this criterion he rejected many proposed instincts, including the religious instinct.
However, McDougall added a second criterion alluded to above, namely, that a primary emotion should be observable in human abnormal behavior. That is, if an emotion appeared in human beings in an extreme and exaggerated display, which would be considered pathological, that dysfunctional reaction would also confirm its status as a primary emotion or simple instinct. With this second principle, McDougall placed various pathological behaviors on the same psychological dimensions as other personality characteristics and removed any arbitrary divides between what would be considered “normal” or “abnormal.” In effect, he presaged the intimate link between primary-process emotions and psychological imbalances that Panksepp (1998a, 2005) advanced almost a century later from a rigorous neuroscientific perspective and that many have sought to include in the “bible” of psychiatric diagnostics, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , most recently the fifth edition (DSM-V; see Chapter 18). The difficulties in such tasks are enormous, because the behaviorist revolution restricted discussion to discretely measurable units of behavior, making discussion of psychological processes in animals especially suspect of challenged intellectual thinking.
In any case, McDougall was on his way to developing what may be considered the first comprehensive psychological theory of personality. Using his two criteria, he identified eleven primary instincts, only the first seven of which he considered well defined. However, in addition to winnowing the list of primary instincts down to eleven, McDougall added four insightful principles to his theory of personality that, while based on the comparative (cross-species) behavioral observation method, remain largely consistent with later thinking drawn totally independently from cross-species affective neuroscience research.
The Four Principles of McDougall’s Social Psychology
First, McDougall viewed these instincts as mental processes and thus described them in terms of what he called “the cognitive, the affective, and the conative aspects” (p. 23) with the latter referring to a natural impulse toward directed effort. By cognitive, he meant the sensory-experiential component, that is, a “complex of sensations that has significance or meaning for the animal” (p. 24). The affective aspect referred to the valenced feeling components, namely, various positive (good) and negative (bad) feelings, which were uniquely associated with particular instinctive behaviors. The conative part was the “striving towards or away from that object” (p. 23). This was the desire, aversion, impulse, craving, or uneasy sense of wanting that accompanied the instinct. So, in McDougall’s hands, an instinct became the result of an evolutionarily relevant stimulus that once perceived was accompanied by a particular emotional-affective excitement along with particular behaviors or at least the impulse to such behaviors.
Second, McDougall argued that the stimulus-receptive and behavioral-action parts of an instinct could be modified. On the sensory side, experience adapts instinctive actions to match new environmental demands. McDougall reasoned that we can learn to fear stimuli that were previously neutral, that is, did not previously elicit fear. He pointed out that animals learn to fear the sight of men and guns and that we learn to feel anger toward those people who have frustrated us in the past. This learning principle is comparable to Panksepp’s secondary-level processing, which, following traditional behavioral learning theory, provides for the conditioning of the instinctual unconditional response systems. It has come quite clear from modern neuroscience research that the learning mechanisms in all mammals are anatomically and neurochemically very similar (see Kandel, 2007; LeDoux, 2012)—although to this day neither of these neurobehavioristic scholars puts much stock in the view that animals affectively experience their emotional arousals.
Third, McDougall offered the important everyday observation that the hidden central feeling aspects of the instincts, the affective parts, do not change qualitatively as a function of learning. For McDougall, even though the perceptions that ignite an instinct and the behavioral expressions of the instincts can change, what we feel remains qualitatively largely unmodified, although they may become stronger or weaker and longer or shorter. McDougall held that “all the principle instincts of man are liable to similar modifications of their afferent and motor parts, while their central parts [feelings] remain unchanged and determine the emotional tone of consciousness and the visceral changes characteristic of the excitement of the instinct” (p. 36). This fundamental principle remains an important element of emotion theory (Izard, 2007) and affective neuroscience (Panksepp, 1998) and is consistent with the conclusion that primal affects remain substantial key components of the unconditional arousal of emotional action systems within the brain (Panksepp & Biven, 2012). However, this is not to deny that learning and cognitions can modify and regulate the intensity and duration of primal emotional feelings, as well as engender more complex derivative feelings that are related to environmental complexities, the concurrent arousal of several emotional syst
ems, and various types of culturally promoted or even (at least in humans) willful regulatory strategies.
Fourth, McDougall emphasized that each primary affect could not be described adequately with language. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to discussing subjective affects is our inability to describe them as precisely as we describe objects in the world. They are qualia, a philosophical term meaning the experiential essence of something that cannot be verbally explicitly described but that must be directly experienced. Thus, McDougall wrote, “a person who had not experienced it [the affect] could no more be made to understand its quality than a totally colour-blind person can be made to understand the experience of colour-sensation” (p. 61).
Although we cannot say exactly what FEAR feels like to a rat or even to another human being, we are sure that both experience a subjectively aversive event that can motivate learning (e.g., acquired escape and avoidance behaviors) and thereby alter exhibited action patterns, based on environmental contingencies. Indeed, an affect, much like the effect of gravity on objects in the world, must be inferred from behavioral changes, but the feeling component can be evaluated (inferred) in animals by whether shifts in the induced states of emotional circuits (as with direct brain stimulation) are rewarding or punishing. Of course, in humans one can ask very direct questions about the intensity and durations of shifting feelings. In short, emotional affects have one of two valences: They either feel good or feel bad. The ones that feel good (SEEKING/Enthusiasm, CARE/Nurturance, and PLAY/Joy) are nature’s emotional rewards; the ones that feel bad (RAGE/Anger, FEAR/Anxiety, and PANIC/Grief/Sadness) are emotional punishments.
This point needs emphasis: We can infer this from any human’s or animal’s behavior, because the individual subsequently attempts to repeat the pleasant rewarding affects and to avoid the unpleasant punishing affects, especially when we include preference measures. For example, nonhuman animals prefer places where their positive emotional brain systems have been stimulated with small electrical currents or micro injections of an appropriate synaptic transmitter/modulator substance, such as amphetamines or opiates; they avoid places where their negative emotions have been likewise stimulated. Corresponding statements can be made about human affective experiences. Because affects evolved many millions of years before the appearance of spoken language, they are difficult to verbally describe, but they are every bit as real as our earth’s gravity that causes apples to fall from trees to the ground rather than the other way around.
The Emotional Foundations of Personality Page 8
