Affective Neuroscience by Jaak Panksepp

1. Affective NeurosciencebyJaak Panksepp

3. 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

4. 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)

5. 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…

6. Emotion and language Some 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

7. 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

9. Schematic representation in the human brain of the major axes of visceral and somatic processing, with their convergence in reptilian brain (basal ganglia)_____________________________________________

10. 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

11. Historical aspects Classical 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

12. Ways of viewing the role of emotions in behavior

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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)

16. 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

17. 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)

18. Definition of emotional systems • Capable of elaboration of subjective feeling states that are affectively valenced • Various sensory stimuli can unconditionally access them • Can generate instinctual motor output • Can modulate sensory input • Can modulate cognitive activities • Can be modulated by cognitive input • Can sustain emotional response after precipitating events have passed • Interaction of emotional systems with circuits for self-presentation - affective consciousness???

19. Criteria for defining basic emotional systems • Valence of feeling • Underlying neural system • Character peripheral and expressive changes of the body

20. Basic emotional systems More primitive: • SEEKING • RAGE • FEAR • PANIC Also, 5. LUST 6. PLAY 7. CARE

21. 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

22. Biological unfolding of emotions

23. 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”

24. 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

25. SELF Interaction between body schema and incoming stimuli (both external and internal) ↓ New kinds of reafferent reverberations ↓ Internal state of affective awareness

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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)

29. Elaboration of basic emotional processes

30. 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

31. Thankyou