Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans

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Abstract

The position advanced in this paper is that the bedrock of emotional feelings is contained within the evolved emotional action apparatus of mammalian brains. This dual-aspect monism approach to brain–mind functions, which asserts that emotional feelings may reflect the neurodynamics of brain systems that generate instinctual emotional behaviors, saves us from various conceptual conundrums. In coarse form, primary process affective consciousness seems to be fundamentally an unconditional “gift of nature” rather than an acquired skill, even though those systems facilitate skill acquisition via various felt reinforcements. Affective consciousness, being a comparatively intrinsic function of the brain, shared homologously by all mammalian species, should be the easiest variant of consciousness to study in animals. This is not to deny that some secondary processes (e.g., awareness of feelings in the generation of behavioral choices) cannot be evaluated in animals with sufficiently clever behavioral learning procedures, as with place-preference procedures and the analysis of changes in learned behaviors after one has induced re-valuation of incentives. Rather, the claim is that a direct neuroscientific study of primary process emotional/affective states is best achieved through the study of the intrinsic (“instinctual”), albeit experientially refined, emotional action tendencies of other animals. In this view, core emotional feelings may reflect the neurodynamic attractor landscapes of a variety of extended trans-diencephalic, limbic emotional action systems—including SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. Through a study of these brain systems, the neural infrastructure of human and animal affective consciousness may be revealed. Emotional feelings are instantiated in large-scale neurodynamics that can be most effectively monitored via the ethological analysis of emotional action tendencies and the accompanying brain neurochemical/electrical changes. The intrinsic coherence of such emotional responses is demonstrated by the fact that they can be provoked by electrical and chemical stimulation of specific brain zones—effects that are affectively laden. For substantive progress in this emerging research arena, animal brain researchers need to discuss affective brain functions more openly. Secondary awareness processes, because of their more conditional, contextually situated nature, are more difficult to understand in any neuroscientific detail. In other words, the information-processing brain functions, critical for cognitive consciousness, are harder to study in other animals than the more homologous emotional/motivational affective state functions of the brain.

Section snippets

Toward a science of animal consciousness

Do other animals have internal experiences? Probably, but there are no mindscopes to evaluate the existence of consciousness in either animals or humans. If we are going to entertain the existence of experiential states (i.e., consciousness) in other animals, we must be willing to work at a theoretical level where arguments are adjudicated by the weight of evidence rather than definitive proof. Such approaches are easier to apply for certain aspects of animal consciousness than for others. My

Anecdotal approaches to animal emotions

At present, as was popular during earlier eras (e.g., Lindsay, 1879; Romanes, 1897), there is a growing animal behavior literature that vigorously seeks to affirm that other animals do have emotional lives. Naturalistic observations offer an invaluable perspective on what animals can do when they are reared in the real world as opposed to artificial laboratories where they often become psychologically constricted (e.g., “kennelized”—see Panksepp, Conner, Forster, Bishop, & Scott (1983)). A

Experimental strategies for studying experienced feelings in animals

A critical dimension commonly missing from non-neuroscience discussions of animal emotions is what type of data should be deemed sufficiently compelling, one way or the other, for agreeing on the general nature of the brain mechanisms by which affective feelings are generated. This, of course, remains one of the great problems in all consciousness studies, doubly difficult in the analysis of animal brains. In the study of human cognitive aspects of consciousness (e.g., perceptual awareness),

Evolutionary levels of consciousness

If we believe consciousness is a single type of brain process, we can easily conclude that animals are unconscious. Certain ontological positions assume that consciousness is based upon the superb language and abstract/logical reasoning capacities of the human mind. When investigators of animal brain functions assume such positions (e.g., Macphail, 1998, Rolls, 1999), then they close the book too abruptly on the topic of animal consciousness. Perhaps, these views simply fail to differentiate

A historical retrospective: The behavioristic denial of animal consciousness

We all understand how difficult an epistemological problem any variant of consciousness is for neuroscience, especially in animal brain research. Let us briefly revisit why the topic was discarded in animal behavioral research throughout the 20th century. For almost a whole century, the discipline of behaviorism, which prevailed in animal experimental psychology, denied that a study of inner mental causes could ever become a workable scientific topic; indeed, the most positivistically

Evidence for internal affective states in animals

So what causes behavior? How could something outside of us cause our muscles to move in coherent ways? Is it merely the power of environmental stimuli, as behaviorism long asserted, or must we also consider the nature of internal events? Obviously, it is not possible to achieve a coherent explanation without considering the evolved integrative functions of the brain (Panksepp et al., 2002). Surely there have to be critical processes inside our brains, and it is increasingly unlikely that they

The SEEKING/expectancy/wanting system of the brain: Its not just “reward prediction error”

The spectacular discovery of electrical self-stimulation from electrode sites along extended areas of the lateral hypothalamus set the stage for understanding the behaviorist concepts of “reward” and “reinforcement,” and perhaps even “pleasure” (Olds, 1977, Wise, 2002). Unfortunately, there were shortcomings to all of these concepts (reviewed in Panksepp & Moskal, in press), and to the present day, it remains unresolved as to what function this psycho-behavioral system of the brain serves in

FEAR systems of the brain: Of low roads, high roads, and royal roads

The study of fear learning has been one of the great success stories of behavioral neuroscience, to a point where the details of associative classical-conditioning have been worked out in considerable detail within prominent cognition–emotion interface zones such as the amygdala (e.g., LeDoux, 1996, LeDoux, 2002). It is now recognized that conditional information that predicts pain can reach the amygdala via “low roads” from the thalamus, and “high roads” from the cortex. The only aspect of the

The core emotional systems for social affects

In addition to FEAR and SEEKING circuits, there is sufficient evidence to postulate at least five other basic emotional networks shared by all mammals. Of course, as already noted, there are a larger variety of non-emotional affects based on our bodily needs (e.g., hunger and thirst) and various background states of the body (e.g., fatigue and feelings of well-being) but they will not be covered here. The five remaining emotional systems are ones devoted to anger-RAGE, sexuality-LUST,

Species differences in emotions: Research costs and benefits

It should go without saying that there will be abundant species differences in the details of all brain emotional circuits, and hence the associated affective proclivities. Variety is a cardinal characteristic of life, but practically all that variety is based on patterns of generalizable principles. Thus, although rats and mice differ dramatically in their social responsivity and general intelligence (Whishaw, Metz, Kolb, & Pellis, 2001), they share quite similar molecular mechanisms for

A recognition of affective states may improve our animal research

An important issue in animal research seeking practical answers to human problems must always be which findings from animals may apply to humans. In such endeavors, affective change must be a key concern. Obviously, if there are inadequate homologies in the underlying neural control mechanisms, then the animal work will not give us credible clues about the substrates of core affects in humans. Under those circumstances, the classical sin of anthropomorphic reasoning would be as severe as many

The sin and salvation of anthropomorphism (or how Lloyd Morgan’s canon misfired!)

The suggestion that human feelings may have substantive parallels in animal brains (zoomorphism) and that animals may have some emotional feelings akin to those of humans (anthropomorphism)—remain sins in various intellectual communities, even though modern variants of such reasoning can be based on the deep functional homologies in mammalian brains which arise from a massively shared genetic heritage. If humans have consciousness, as they surely do, and if one accepts an evolutionary point of

Neural substrates of conscious and unconscious emotions, and cognition–emotion interactions

No discussion of consciousness can be complete without a consideration of unconscious brain processes. Just as there is no single type of consciousness, there is surely no single type of unconsciousness. It is unlikely that either conscious or unconscious brain processes reflect singular types of neural mechanisms. I suspect we can all agree that conscious neural processes are constructed from unconscious neural components. Each functioning nerve cell is probably deeply unconscious. Networks of

How is affect created in the brain? Levels of control in emotional/affective processing along the neuroaxis

Obviously, the mind, just like the brain, is a multilayered system that works in hierarchical bottom-up and recursive top-down ways. There are pre-ordained reflexive emotional responses very low in the brain that are, in and of themselves, deeply unconscious (e.g., startle reflex). However, there are many reasons to believe a solid neural foundation for affective consciousness was laid down in emotion-coordinating systems situated a little further up in the brainstem, in areas such as the PAG

Five reasons to take animal consciousness seriously

In sum, there are at least five substantive reasons to cultivate the study of affective consciousness in animal models more intensively than it has in the past: (1) the triangulation affective neuro-psycho-behavioral strategy may be an effective way to decode how affect is generated in mammalian brains, (2) such work may reveal the very foundations of human consciousness, (3) the study of affect may be essential for coherent progress in understanding the nature of many psychiatric disorders,

Coda

When we observe certain emotional activities in animals that resemble our own, are we justified in inferring that they also have feelings? If the pat answer is no, as it has long been, then the problem of animal consciousness is probably insoluble. Those who are committed to such conservative views will probably assert that the strategy advanced here is little more than a scientifically cultivated opinion. But if we can generate new animal behavior predictions and/or make credible predictions

Acknowledgments

I appreciate useful comments by Marc Lewis and Doug Watt on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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