Interesting. And fits my introspection disturbingly well. Except for the bit about panic attacks: those feel more RAGE/FEAR to me. I wonder if the name PANIC led some analysis a little astray. If you rename that LONELINESS (admittedly, an awfully long word to all-caps) and then use "panic" to describe intense acute FEAR, RAGE *or* LONELINESS I think that model fits everything.
he used PANIC precisely because he thinks it's the root emotion behind panic attacks -- i agree that many other people's accounts of their panic attacks don't seem plausibly connected to loneliness. (I've also heard "my panic attacks feel completely physical and non-emotional, and don't track emotional situations").
Check out How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett for a more recent human-focused perspective, including much pushback on the ideas of basic emotions and dedicated emotion circuits.
Fun question for your favorite AI: "Given her book "How Emotions Are Made", what do you think Lisa Feldman Barrett's opinion of Jaak Panksepp's "Affective Neuroscience" would be?" (Have you read Barrett's book?)
Haven't read Barretts book (never heard of it before today) but I strongly expect to buy Panksepp's POV over Barrett's.
A "cognition-first" frame on emotion, where intellectual or cultural interpretations of situations define what we feel, doesn't resonate well with my own experience, and doesn't seem to be a particularly fruitful/practical perspective.
A psychologist would tend to believe that it's "good news" if cognition has a lot of effect on emotions, because then talk therapy and personal choice would be effective at solving emotional problems. I think that such a result would be *bad* news, because *how* to think and *how* to do therapy are so underspecified that this line of research can't really lead to clear-cut, unambiguously successful techniques. If you can't cheer up a mouse you haven't got much hope of knowing how to cheer up a human, by my standards of "knowing."
As someone who just recently had to put a LOT of thought on the order of cognitive components I strongly agree in treating emotion separately. I see memories, sensory and motor data and emotional states as core elements of cognition itself, and the combination of these elements as, of course, what enables us to have subjective experiences. My preliminary research points towards psychology having more chances at being effective if they merge movements with therapy, somewhat like they did in that The OA tv show.
Very interesting read, thank you. I suspect you will be interested in the papers from Paul Cisek’s “Phylogenetic refinement” project: https://cisek.org/pavel/
What we've learned since is that these aren't the effector systems that we thought they were. That was experimental artifact because things like "sham rage" were so dramatic. It now looks like these circuits drive our feelings toward everything we experience in the world, what we can call "valence". So that frustration and itch to get up is that exploratory drive telling us the movie is boring or the work is too hard. Or that rage system reacting to the podcast about whatever it is they're trying to get us riled up about. And we have no control or awareness that these systems are driving how the world occurs to us
There is a neuroscientist named Mark Solms whose research program is to build a synthesis of Panksepp's affective neuroscience with active inference and Freudian psychoanalysis (!?).
While I don't endorse or anti-endorse his theories, he is at least a real scientist, not a crackpot, and his popular book "The Hidden Spring" is a good read.
Great review of the book, but this is from the 90s. Have you checked out Lisa Feldman Barrett's book on constructed emotions. Her (and current state-of-the-art) argument against the hard-wired theories of Panksepp et al is that neural specificity is not well-supported by empirical evidence. Instead, emotions are constructed experiences arising through (a) core affect (continuous dimensions of valence and arousal, non-specific to discrete emotions), (b) conceptual knowledge, and (c) contextual prediction. She has a good deal of empirical evidence for her claims and against the hard-wired circuit claims.
Also: It's interesting that swaddling a baby doesn't seem to induce RAGE.
yeah he never addresses the fact that many babies find swaddling soothing.
Is this a general phenomenon or does it rely on being a recognized and trusted caregiver?
Interesting. And fits my introspection disturbingly well. Except for the bit about panic attacks: those feel more RAGE/FEAR to me. I wonder if the name PANIC led some analysis a little astray. If you rename that LONELINESS (admittedly, an awfully long word to all-caps) and then use "panic" to describe intense acute FEAR, RAGE *or* LONELINESS I think that model fits everything.
he used PANIC precisely because he thinks it's the root emotion behind panic attacks -- i agree that many other people's accounts of their panic attacks don't seem plausibly connected to loneliness. (I've also heard "my panic attacks feel completely physical and non-emotional, and don't track emotional situations").
Check out How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett for a more recent human-focused perspective, including much pushback on the ideas of basic emotions and dedicated emotion circuits.
How much do you buy this?
Fun question for your favorite AI: "Given her book "How Emotions Are Made", what do you think Lisa Feldman Barrett's opinion of Jaak Panksepp's "Affective Neuroscience" would be?" (Have you read Barrett's book?)
Haven't read Barretts book (never heard of it before today) but I strongly expect to buy Panksepp's POV over Barrett's.
A "cognition-first" frame on emotion, where intellectual or cultural interpretations of situations define what we feel, doesn't resonate well with my own experience, and doesn't seem to be a particularly fruitful/practical perspective.
A psychologist would tend to believe that it's "good news" if cognition has a lot of effect on emotions, because then talk therapy and personal choice would be effective at solving emotional problems. I think that such a result would be *bad* news, because *how* to think and *how* to do therapy are so underspecified that this line of research can't really lead to clear-cut, unambiguously successful techniques. If you can't cheer up a mouse you haven't got much hope of knowing how to cheer up a human, by my standards of "knowing."
As someone who just recently had to put a LOT of thought on the order of cognitive components I strongly agree in treating emotion separately. I see memories, sensory and motor data and emotional states as core elements of cognition itself, and the combination of these elements as, of course, what enables us to have subjective experiences. My preliminary research points towards psychology having more chances at being effective if they merge movements with therapy, somewhat like they did in that The OA tv show.
Very interesting read, thank you. I suspect you will be interested in the papers from Paul Cisek’s “Phylogenetic refinement” project: https://cisek.org/pavel/
Great article. Is there work that studies how SEEK, FEAR, RAGE, and PANIC are manipulated by online platforms to modify human behaviour?
I've heard of the Cybernetic Big Five Theory, which might be similar to what you asked for.
What we've learned since is that these aren't the effector systems that we thought they were. That was experimental artifact because things like "sham rage" were so dramatic. It now looks like these circuits drive our feelings toward everything we experience in the world, what we can call "valence". So that frustration and itch to get up is that exploratory drive telling us the movie is boring or the work is too hard. Or that rage system reacting to the podcast about whatever it is they're trying to get us riled up about. And we have no control or awareness that these systems are driving how the world occurs to us
There is a neuroscientist named Mark Solms whose research program is to build a synthesis of Panksepp's affective neuroscience with active inference and Freudian psychoanalysis (!?).
While I don't endorse or anti-endorse his theories, he is at least a real scientist, not a crackpot, and his popular book "The Hidden Spring" is a good read.
Great review of the book, but this is from the 90s. Have you checked out Lisa Feldman Barrett's book on constructed emotions. Her (and current state-of-the-art) argument against the hard-wired theories of Panksepp et al is that neural specificity is not well-supported by empirical evidence. Instead, emotions are constructed experiences arising through (a) core affect (continuous dimensions of valence and arousal, non-specific to discrete emotions), (b) conceptual knowledge, and (c) contextual prediction. She has a good deal of empirical evidence for her claims and against the hard-wired circuit claims.
Interesting how RAGE seems to occur in such different contexts. Adapted for one but works in a more general fashion, perhaps?