We hate and we love, can one tell me why? – Catullus (84-54 BC)

Emotions are such an essential part of who you are. Indeed, life would be empty and meaningless without them. Love, joy, and the excitement of new discoveries can make life a wonderful experience. At the same time, fear, anger, and sadness can intrude into your life and produce misery beyond what words can express. 

This chapter lays the foundation for understanding why we have emotions. This understanding is built upon in later chapters that show you how to manage them more effectively. It starts with a look at what science has learned about emotions over the past hundred years. Then, it describes the seven basic emotions humans share with all other mammals, the circuits that generate these emotions, and how these circuits come to be activated and regulated by the thinking part of the brain[1]. 

AFFECTS

While love, sadness, anger, pity, and fear have been written about for thousands of years, they were not grouped together under a single psychology term until relatively recently. In 1859, the Scottish psychologist Alexander Bain used the word “emotion” to cover “all that is understood by feelings, states of feeling, pleasures, pains, passions, sentiments, and affections.” This use of the word “emotion” began a fundamental shift in the vocabulary used to describe how the mind works. The only problem was that, for the next hundred years, there was no agreement on what emotions were and how they were triggered. 

The word “emotion” itself is derived from the Latin verb “emovere” which means “to move out.” And this is what emotions do: The word describes feelings that urge you to act in some way. For example, fear causes you to want to get away from whatever is causing you to be afraid.

Today, the field of neuroscience[2] uses the term “affect” to describe the various types of feelings and emotions you experience. Affects themselves are classified into three categories.

The first category includes sensory affects,such as the sweetness you experience when sugar is placed on the tongue or the experience of heat or cold. The second category is homeostatic affects[3]. These drive you to take the actions needed to satisfy the physical needs of your body, such as hunger and thirst that drive you to eat and drink water. The third category comprises your emotional affects–the ones this book is about. 

Currently, neuroscience has identified seven core emotion systems in the brains of all mammals. Each system triggers the same behaviors in animals and humans. While there is no way of knowing what animals are experiencing, when these systems are triggered in you, they produce the feelings that we call emotions.

THE SEVEN EMOTIONAL SYSTEMS

The discovery of the brain’s emotional systems began with Walter Hess. He was one of the first people to identify portions of the brain associated with a specific emotional effect. While experimenting with cats in the 1930s, he found he could trigger different behaviors by applying tiny electric impulses to different parts of the hypothalamus, an interior part of the brain. When he did this, cats would display defensive and aggressive behaviors or curl up and go to sleep, depending on the location that was being stimulated with the electrical impulse.

In the 1990s, Jaak Panksepp coined the term “affective neuroscience,” which today is seen as a discipline that studies the brain mechanisms underlying emotions. Currently, seven emotional systems have been identified in the brains of humans and every other mammal that has been studied. 

These seven emotional systems are foundational tools for living that are built into us at birth. For example, it is not necessary to teach babies or young animals to become angry, fearful, or to panic. At the same time, these systems are shaped by experience, and change as a person or animal learns how to adapt to life’s challenges. 

The systems that produce the various pleasurable feelings you experience include the SEEKING, LUST, CARE, and PLAY emotional systems. Along with these are three systems that produce unpleasant feelings: FEAR, RAGE, and PANIC. Neuroscientists capitalize each of these words to indicate that they are referring to primary emotional systems in the brain. This helps distinguish these terms from the way we usually use each word.

The SEEKING/Desire System is essential for all the other emotional systems to operate effectively. It generates an urge to explore and engage with the world with eager curiosity and interest. You see this in young mammals, such as kittens and puppies, as they explore and learn about their environment. You also see this in infants as they stare with fascination at their hands and learn to coordinate their bodies. Later, as they gain the ability to crawl and then walk, this system urges them to explore their world. The SEEKING system helps animals find and eagerly anticipate all kinds of resources needed for survival, such as water, food, and warmth. As an adult, this system helps you become absorbed in the things that interest you and explore new possibilities. 

The PLAY/Physical Social-Engagement system urges both young children and young mammals to engage in physical play like wrestling, running, and chasing each other. This type of play helps them bond socially and learn social limits, what behaviors are permissible, and what behaviors are taboo. In humans, this carries over in the “ribbing” and joking that continues to add fun in adulthood as well as the many other forms of adult play. While the circuits identified with the PLAY system are in the inner part of the brain, brain imaging shows the outer portion of the brain where you do your thinking lights up during play. This corresponds with research which indicates that play enhances learning. It also shows that these circuits deep inside of your brain become tightly integrated with those in the outside, thinking portion.

The CARE/Maternal Nurturance system seems to be mostly found in mammals and helps to ensure that mammalian parents have a strong desire to take care of their offspring. You also see this system active in young children who seem to have a natural affinity to exhibit nurturing behaviors, reflected in a love of animals, certain toys, stuffed animals, or dolls. 

Both the CARE system, along with the PANIC system, plays an important role in generating feelings of empathy and sympathy when bad things happen to others, but especially to those we love. It also plays a role in the formation of friendships and the love you feel towards those you are close to.

The LUST/Sexual System in mammals and other types of animals ensures reproduction. In humans, it’s imprinted within infant brains during the second trimester. However, the sexual desire generated by this system only becomes fully awakened by the flood of sex hormones that are secreted during adolescence.

The RAGE/Anger system helps an animal protect both itself and the things it needs to survive by attacking threats. This system produces what we normally call anger when it is highly active and irritation when it is only mildly active. 

The FEAR/Anxiety system helps all mammals reduce pain and the likelihood of destruction. It promotes freezing in place when danger is far away and flight when it’s near. It helps you identify and predict potential threats. It also plays a key role in strengthening memories associated with danger, so it can be avoided in the future. When danger is unavoidable, the RAGE/Anger system activates.

The PANIC/Separation-Distress system is found in all young mammals who depend on maternal care for survival. It is seen in the distress that both human and animal babies show when separated from their caregivers. The cries, prompted by the PANIC system, activate the CARE system in the parent, motivating the parent to find and comfort its baby. You also experience this system with the sadness you feel when separated from loved ones.

While we share the SEEKING, LUST, RAGE, and FEAR emotional systems with reptiles and fish, the CARE, PANIC, and PLAY systems seem to be more uniquely mammalian and give both us and other mammals our more complex social abilities. 

Even though the inner part of your brain (the subcortex) has the same structures that generate emotions as other mammals, the outer part where you do your thinking (the cortex) is much larger. In fact, it’s the largest part of your brain.

When considering the function of these seven inborn positive and negative emotions, we see that they serve as rewards and punishment that trigger behavior needed to both survive and thrive. Imagine, for example, being stung by hornets flying out of a nest that you accidentally disturbed. Suddenly, you become filled with fear and race away from the nest without the need to think about it. Once a safe distance is reached, and you sense you are out of danger, relief is felt.

 The fear associated with this memory will now help you avoid being stung again by causing you to be more vigilant when outdoors. In the same way, behavior that produces positive feelings causes you to want to repeat the behavior. When a parent smiles at a child, it encourages the child to repeat the behavior that caused the parent to smile.

HOW CHILDHOOD SHAPES EMOTIONS

Currently, it is thought that when you were born, the outer portion of your brain where you do your thinking (the cortex) is mostly a blank slate similar to a computer that has yet to be programmed. All the hardware needed for the computer to receive information, do calculations, and display the results is there. However, the instructions needed to coordinate all these activities and make the computer useful are missing. 

In the same way, all the structures and neural pathways needed to generate the various emotions you experience are there in the inner part of the brain. However, the outer, thinking part of your brain needs to gain experience and learn how to regulate these systems. 

How the thinking part of your brain learns to regulate these emotional systems is influenced by what you experience as a child. The best way to see this is to look at situations where things go terribly wrong. One sad example involves babies that were cared for in orphanages in developing countries that had few resources. These babies would often spend days lying in a crib, cold, and wet. Because there was not enough staff, they were cared for on a schedule. During feeding times, instead of being held, they left the babies in their cribs with the bottles propped up. 

As a result, the babies never learned to associate being fed with human contact and warmth. What was even worse was their cries of distress, prompted by the PANIC system, often went unheeded for hours. Their distress became so painful that this system simply shut down. So, while their physical needs were met, these infants did not experience the joy that comes from engaging with another human being or the comfort that comes from having their distress soothed by loving hands. When these babies were adopted, the lack of warm and loving physical contact during infancy made it difficult for them to respond to and bond with their adoptive parents. 

A simple experiment involving oxytocin shows how emotional systems in the brain that do not develop properly cause difficulty in bonding. Oxytocin is the hormone associated with both quieting the PANIC system and generating feelings of connection between people through the CARE system.

In this experiment, two groups of mothers with four-year-old children played a simple computer matching game. One group had children and their birth mothers. The other group had children who were neglected as infants and their adoptive mothers. Each mother held her child on her lap as they played the game. They measured oxytocin levels before and after each group played the game. The oxytocin levels in both the birth mothers and the child they raised from birth rose significantly. However, the children who were neglected as infants showed no change in their levels. This nonresponse indicated a lack of development in key emotional systems. 

This simple experiment, along with others involving both humans and animals, shows a complex interplay between the emotional systems deep within the brain and the higher thinking portions that develop as an infant grows. So, while children are born with emotional systems designed to help them get the things they need to survive, interact with others, and avoid danger, how these systems develop is shaped by their experiences. A healthy, loving environment that allows a child to play and explore results in the proper development of these systems. Neglectful and abusive environments can cause them to develop in ways that cause problems in later life.

As bleak as this may sound, the good news is that children like this, who later receive proper treatment, can learn how to form stable, healthy bonds with their primary caretakers and others. This shows how adept the brain is at developing new connections. This ability to make new connections is also seen in stroke victims and brain injury victims who have lost the use of certain muscles. With training, the brain is able to reroute and create neural pathways to replace those that were damaged. In the same way, with proper therapy, the higher, executive part of the brain in these children can regain its ability to connect to and manage emotional circuits that had shut down in a more normal way.

The next chapter focuses on how, as a baby grows and develops, the seven basic emotional systems interconnect with the higher functions of the brain to produce what are known as the cognitive emotions: love, guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride, envy, and jealousy. This completes the foundation you need as we turn our attention to the problem of managing emotions that interfere with your life.

SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

·       The term affect is used to describe feelings that urge you to act in some way. There are three types: sensory affects, homeostatic affects, and emotional affects

·       In the 1990s, Jaak Panksepp coined the term “affective neuroscience,” which today is seen as a discipline that studies the brain mechanisms underlying emotions.

·       Affective neuroscience has identified seven brain-based emotional action systems in mammals:

Systems that Generate Positive Emotions

SEEKING – Generates an urge to explore and engage with the world with eager curiosity and interest.

LUST – Generates sexual desire

CARE – Produces the desire in parents to care for their offspring

PLAY – Generates the desire for physical play like wrestling, running, and chasing each other in young children. In adults, it generates the various forms of adult play, like playing games and joking.

Systems that Generate Negative Emotions

FEAR – Generates the urge to freeze in place when danger is far away and flight when it’s near.

RAGE – Generates the urge to protect yourself by attacking threats. This urge is normally called anger when highly active and irritation when only mildly active.

PANIC – Generates the distress that babies show when separated from their caregivers and the sadness you feel when separated from loved ones.

·       The higher thinking part of your brain (the cortex) learns to regulate these emotional systems by what you experience as a child.

·       Childhood experiences of neglect and abuse can interfere with the normal development of these systems.

·       The brain has a remarkable ability to heal by creating new neurons and rerouting neural pathways.

THINGS TO DO

·       Begin to pay attention to times when you are upset or experiencing difficult emotions.

o  Exactly what triggered the emotion? 

o  What was going on just before the emotion was triggered? 

o  What thoughts and behavior did your emotions generate? 

·       Answers to these questions will give you material to consider as you work through the following chapters. Some find it helpful to record their answers in a journal so they can more clearly recall them later.

[1] The “thinking part of the brain” refers to the cerebral cortex. The emotional systems discussed in this chapter are in the subcortex which is located below the cerebral cortex and is completely covered by it.

[2] Neuroscience is the study of the human brain and nervous system.

[3] Homeostasis is used to refer to something that is in a state of balance, such as when the water and salt in your body are in proper proportion to each other. Homeostatic affects are feelings that urge you to do something to restore metabolic balance of some kind in your body, such as drinking water when you’re dehydrated or eating when your body needs energy.