Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Neuroscience
by
Jaak 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?
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 systems
1. Capable of elaboration of subjective feeling states
that are affectively valenced
2. Various sensory stimuli can unconditionally access
them
3. Can generate instinctual motor output
4. Can modulate sensory input
5. Can modulate cognitive activities
6. Can be modulated by cognitive input
7. Can sustain emotional response after precipitating
events have passed
8. Interaction of emotional systems with circuits for
self-presentation - affective consciousness???
Criteria for defining basic emotional
systems
1. Valence of feeling
2. Underlying neural system
3. Character peripheral and expressive
changes of the body
Basic emotional systems
More primitive:
1. SEEKING
2. RAGE
3. FEAR
4. PANIC
Also,
5. LUST
6. PLAY
7. 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???
PAG:
Elaborates a visceral-type map of the body
Elaborates all basic emotional systems except PLAY
Elaborates pain
Thank you