BSP 91, The Origin of Emotions with Jaak Panksepp

[David]

I liked the way emotional functionality was described, with control shifting from one emotional system to another. The evolutionary context for emotion was good.

[Joseph]

Great interview, made me change the way I think about emotion! I certainly never thought emotion had such an important role underlying the way our minds work.

I was suprised to learn that the amygdala was not the heart of emotion and fear but actually more involved in learning and conditioned fear responses, but I totally get this now it's been explained.

I really liked Jaak's idea of there being 3 'levels' to the brain with the emotional systems at the base, the learning systems in the middle and the neocortex at the top.

However, this left me wondering which neuroanatomical structures are responsible for the 'primary level' emotional thinking. If the basal ganglia/limbic lobe are responsible for the 'second level' learning systems, then where does the emotional/primary level come from?

[David]

From a philosophical perspective we often hear reason should drive everything and reason should be supreme. But what if we use reason because it's emotionally satisfying, thereby putting emotion back on top? Reason doesn't precipitate anything or generate action. Emotion does that. This is why I put reason as number three on the hierarchy following emotion which is first and values which are second. Yes, we use reason because it is emotionally satisfying to us, but we also use reason because we value what reason provides. When people talk of science I wish it could be expressed in this manner.

[Viktoria]

When I listened to the interview, I had in mind this question; what is the difference between "emotions" and "feelings"?
As a simple google search suggests, there is no clear distionction between the two, and the views among psychologists differ.

But this episode of the brain science podcast made me think that there might be a neurological basis for distinguishing between the two, in the sense that "emotions" are primary processes, while "feelings" (although not explicity mentioned in the episode IIRC) are secondary and thus arise in the cortex.
Nevertheless there is a continous iinteraction between the two, which might be the reason why it's difficult to draw a line..?

[Virginia]

Damasio (BSP 90) has long tried to make a clear distinction between the terms emotion and feelings, but even he isn't totally consistent.

Damasio uses feelings to refer to "the perception of emotions," while trying to restrict the word emotion to the primary process. The problem is that that is NOT how we use the word emotion in common conversation. Also, it conflicts with the use of the term by other respected scientists like Paul Eckman who identified 6 "universal emotions" based on our ability to recognize them via facial expressions.

Eckman's six were: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, fear, and and disgust. (We talked about disgust with Rachel Herz in BSP 86. These sound more like what Damasio would call "feelings."

Obviously these differ from the 7 primary emotional affects that have been determined experimentally by Jaak Panksepp: SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. (Panksepp uses all caps in his writing to emphasize that these ARE primary processes that occur subcortically in every mammal that has been studied, including humans.)

So as your Google search showed attempts to give these terms separate distinct meanings are probably doomed to fail. I think that is one reason why Panksepp has long used the term "emotional affects."