Emotions come first: an affective neuroscience perspective on addiction.
Humans are mammals, and the very first primary-process emotional state that all mammals share is SEEKING (Panksepp, 2012). Although the idea that animals feel emotions is something that neuroscience has carefully avoided since the days of B.F. Skinner and behaviorism, Ivan Pavlov himself never discarded the idea that his dogs felt emotion, and even seemed convinced that his dogs contracted a form of PTSD when his lab was flooded. Behaviorism, which carefully avoided talking about the emotional state of animal subjects in any way, was succeeded by the cognitive revolution, which came about during the most recent technological revolution and appropriately likened the human brain to a kind of cognitive computer, with various brain structures functioning as ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’. Many premier and influential neuroscientists still, to this day, believe that emotions are a uniquely human phenomenon; that emotions are somehow ‘read-out’ by higher cognitive centers in the brain and animals therefore do not feel true emotions (LeDoux, 2016).
We now know that the hard science simply doesn’t support this idea. As a result, some other powerful and influential neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have even gone so far as to completely reverse their thinking and admit that the old ‘read-out’ theory of emotions was wrong and that emotions are generated by more evolutionarily ancient brain circuits (Damasio, 2010). What hard science has shown us — and what Jaak Panksepp had been saying for decades before his death — is that emotions are a fundamental property of animal life and an extremely basic, absolutely integral ingredient in any and all consciousness, including the ‘cognitive’ consciousness that underlies every single human thought.
Jaak Panksepp and his ‘affective neuroscience’ perspective takes the position opposite the behaviorists and the cognitivists that followed them; Panksepp has been stating that emotions are a fundamental property of all animal life for decades, even as his work was marginalized and largely ignored by the mainstream neuroscientific community, which continues to be awash in behavioral and cognitive models of thinking.
Despite Panksepp’s incredible marginalization and the fact that basically nobody ever talks about his work, many of his ideas are proving to be incredibly prophetic and far-sighted while also being anchored in the hard neuroscience that Freud and others craved but simply didn’t have the technology to access. Hard neuroscience has been largely missing from psychology and psychiatry, where psychoanalysis continues in the form of talk therapy, albeit alongside pharmacotherapy. While talk therapy and pharmacotherapy certainly have their uses, they also have their limits, and many of us feel there is much more to our mental and emotional lives that just seems to be slightly out of reach.
Panksepp’s invaluable contributions to the field, which are based in the hard neuroscientific work he did studying affective and emotional systems across mammalian species, have the potential to alleviate human suffering on an inconceivable scale, especially given the astounding rates of addiction, anxiety, depression, obesity, and other ‘mental disorders’ that we live with today, which might be better understood as emotional disorders given both the opaqueness of the term ‘mental disorder’ and the ever-mounting evidence that emotional processing and regulation are absolutely critical in our understanding and treatment of these disorders.
Panksepp, prescient in his identification of the neural circuits underlying social connection and grief among mammals, predicted that understanding and treating brain inflammation would be critical in our future understanding of depression. His prediction has been validated by the recent breakthroughs in psychoneuroimmunology that prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that inflammation in the brain is implicated in all kinds of mental and other disorders, including depression (Nakazawa, 2020). Panksepp also showed astounding foresight in his relatively early discussions of the importance of understanding how the environment affects our genetic expression — but we cannot afford to wait another decade for Panksepp to be proven right yet again. It is time to bring the absolute treasure trove of affective neuroscience to the forefront of the treatment of emotional and mental disorders, including addictive disorders.
Panksepp describes emotions as ancient survival-valuation systems that have both an affective, emotional, ‘feeling’ dimension and also engender specific actions, like seeking an escape when the FEAR circuit is stimulated. Panksepp did decades of homologous/cross-species mammalian research and testing of the various emotional circuits that he discovered existed deep in the ancient, evolutionarily pre-human, sub-cortical structures that exist in all mammalian brains as primitive forms of consciousness while also providing the support for higher cognitive ‘thinking’ consciousness. Panksepp used probes to electrically stimulate these various emotional circuits and observed the effects of the stimulation on various levels and among different structures in the various circuits, among his other extensive testing and research.
Panksepp determined that all mammals have 7 primary-process emotional survival-valuation systems. Humans have evolutionarily maintained these more ancient systems because they are the basis of survival, and because we wouldn’t be conscious at all without these systems.
The 7 primary-process emotional systems, in the order that they evolved, are as follows: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, GRIEF and PLAY. Panksepp stylizes the primary-process emotions in all caps in order to be extremely clear as to the functions of these fundamental systems, and I will do the same. Panksepp wanted to bring hard neuroscience to psychology, and he recognized that semantics and wordplay should be minimized the best they can.
While cognitive-behavioral understandings and treatments of mental disorders like addiction are still predominant, and cognitive-behavioral approaches to issues like obesity seem to be becoming even further popularized with applications like NOOM, even the most hardcore cognitive-behaviorists will benefit from discussion of the affective neuroscience approach. While there are plenty of cognitivists and behaviorists, the affectivists seem to be fewer in number. This seems backwards, as all of us can acknowledge the sheer power and influence our emotions have in our experiences of daily living. Indeed, Charles Darwin himself postulated that animals and humans share emotional traits (Darwin, 1872). Appropriately, some call Darwin’s ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’ Darwin’s forgotten masterpiece.
Certainly, Darwin wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the ancient circuits that lie deep in the brain are inherently emotional in nature and more than just instrumental in underlying our conscious experience. Darwin wondered about the evolutionary importance of emotions and facial expressions in the quest for survival. Darwin deduced that animals and humans communicated their feelings of different emotional states with specific facial expressions as a means of adaptive behavior to enhance survival.
Critical to understanding the scientific truths in the theories of affective neuroscience, humans who are born without the most evolutionarily-recent neocortex still display the 7 primary-process emotions that all mammals display, which further proves that these emotions are both generated in the deeper parts of the brain and not dependent on the more ‘human’ neocortex for experience or expression. On the contrary, if the deeper structures that make up these emotional circuits develop lesions, we cease to display emotionality or meaningful consciousness (Panksepp, 2012).
Our emotions are survival-valuation systems; they are signals that let us know how we fare on the constant evolutionary quest to survive, thrive, and pass on our genetics. When stimulated electrically or chemically, these emotional circuits feel intrinsically ‘rewarding’ or ‘punishing’ on their own. Mammals don’t enjoy the FEAR that comes with a lack of safety and a threat to their survival — it is a fundamentally punishing signal that both colors our perceptions of the universe with underlying, affectively FEARFUL tones that we feel on a deep level and also gets us to take action to ensure our survival, whether that action be related to fleeing, fighting, or freezing.
This affect-action dual utility is inherent in each of the primary process emotions; there exists both the feeling-tones that come with a shift in our physiological state and add emotional ‘color’ to our worlds as well as predictable courses of action that the feeling states engender. Stimulation of FEAR means we both feel fear and run away; stimulation of RAGE means we both feel anger and fight, and so on. While the SEEKING system is central to understanding addictive disorders, further groundwork needs to be laid to help us understand these emotional-evaluation systems as a whole.
We continuously, automatically, and subconsciously evaluate our surroundings every second via a process that Stephen Porges, PhD calls ‘neuroception’. In the process of neuroception, we are evaluating environmental cues that trigger feelings that indicate risks, rewards, danger, and safety. Crucially, the process of neuroception happens at the subconscious level, below the level of our higher-level conscious awareness (Porges, 2011).
Our nervous systems are constantly evaluating the environment, subconsciously scanning the environment for cues of survival risks and rewards while simultaneously cross-checking these environmental informational cues against our learning/memory systems, all of which co-exist in the same circuits and work together to both generate emotions and allow us to adapt and act quickly to maintain survival based on past experiences. We can feel our physiological state shift automatically when we perceive cues that have an immediate bearing on our survival — like when we suddenly notice a gigantic spider or a $100 bill on the floor.
All of our emotions are ‘value indicators’ — they are signals that nudge (or shove) us into approaching or avoiding a person, place, or thing. In the case of human life, these primary-process emotions also become our higher-level thoughts, which are more clearly evaluative in nature and (should) aid us in making the decisions that will aid in the attainment of survival-related rewards and the avoiding of the painful experiences that have led to death in our ancestors.
We feel our bodies react quite differently to the smiling face of a friend at our front door and the cunning smile on the face of a stranger in a dark alley at night. This is due to the process of neuroception, which quickly and subconsciously determines survival-related emotional valuations, triggers the activation of the appropriate emotional circuit, and almost instantly alters our physiology, mobilizing us to act via the fight-flight stress response in the case of the stranger in the alley. Our interaction with the potentially-dangerous stranger might instantly cause overt emotional feelings of FEAR or RAGE depending on the details of the environmental situation — like whether we have someone to protect or not. The change in our physiological state — racing heart, a sudden surge of adrenaline and energy — and the emotional ‘feeling’ tones of the experience are one and the same.
In the case of the smiling friend at the front door, seeing their smile would trigger the release of dopamine, resulting in the pleasurable, anticipatory energetic anticipation of the SEEKING system as well as the further pleasurable neurochemical cascade that comes with the activation of positive emotional circuits such as CARE and PLAY.
These emotional survival-valuation systems, when triggered, alter our physiology and create powerful affective feelings that we naturally tend to perceive as rewarding or punishing. The alteration in our physiology further leads us to specific behaviors, and also intrinsically engages and ‘programs’ the learning/memory systems. In other words, our primary-process emotions automatically lead to the secondary-processes of learning and memory, which explains why.
Here is a fundamental and critical difference between the perspective of the behaviorists and the cognitivists and that of the affectivists. Behaviorists were not interested in the deeper neural nature of emotions and motivation — and besides, they didn’t have the technology to make those connections even if they were. Skinner was content to place the deeper, intrinsic, possibly-emotional processes of the organisms whose behavior they were attempting to understand and control into what he called a ‘black box’.
The black box of the mind was akin to the ‘black box’ of a DVR machine or modem to a plumber; we might be able to observe the inputs and the outputs, but who can make sense of all the wires and what they do? The brain is undeniably complex. Back then, nobody could seriously study the brain due to a lack of technology, and the mind/brain was indeed a ‘black box’. Behaviorists, and too often the cognitivists that have followed, considered only stimuli and responses as they were associated with rewards and punishments, along with a mysterious process called “reinforcement” that was supposed to glue them all together somewhere in the ‘black box’.
Back in Skinner’s day, we simply had to be content in saying that we knew the ‘inputs’ (stimuli) and we could observe the ‘outputs’ (behavioral response), which would allow us to say that this stimulus leads to this response, despite the indisputable fact that there is a complex organism in the middle of that stimulus-response equation.
Thus, the equation is always stimulus-organism-response, and the response of the organism depends on the physiological state of the organism, which depends upon a multitude of factors. The physiological state of the organism is massively impacted by the stimulation or lack of stimulation of various emotional circuits, and this physiology creates a ‘neural platform’ that affects the processes of learning and memory.
A good example of this is in fear conditioning, where organisms quickly (or sometimes slowly, depending on many factors including genetic predispositions and past stressors or trauma) learn to avoid places that their brains have learned to associate with the fearful, painful, punishing experiences of the past. The emotional state of FEAR is a great teacher sometimes, but so is the emotional state of PLAY.
In general, Panksepp found that the ‘affective tone’ of our experiences determines how much and how quickly we will learn from those experiences (Panksepp, 2012). Although this is nuanced and varies based on the individual, generally speaking, the stronger our emotions, the more deeply we learn and remember. We can sense this neuroscientific truth on an intuitive level.
The best teachers are the ones who teach with passion; the teachers who can be contagiously emotional and give rise to passion in their students. The most passionate, emotionally-driven students tend to be the best learners. Again, our ability to get organisms to respond to a stimulus, like the presentation of material for learning in a classroom, is dependent on their physiology, which goes hand in hand with our emotional states.
The relevance of these primary-process emotions and the secondary-process learning/memory mechanisms to the understanding and treatment of addictive disorders cannot be understated. Understanding various forms of emotional dysregulation and how they give rise to the deep learning of maladaptive addictive behavior is central to the life-process learning disorder model of addiction.
Sadly, much of our focus these days remains on the cognitive aspects of addictions, which, as we can see here, are actually tertiary-process. We often attempt to treat addictive disorders through the ‘top-down’ focus of traditional talk therapies rather than the ‘bottom-up’ rebalancing of primary-process emotional circuits. If we were to focus on rebalancing the underlying emotional dysregulation, the imbalances in emotional processing that lead to negative physiological states that lead to the maladaptive behaviors that serve as the defining symptoms of many mental disorders, including addictions of all kinds, would be able to be treated at the root of the problem.
People who develop addictive disorders often report a fundamental inability to regulate their own emotional states. We know that human beings that present with addictive disorders often have other mental disorders that are characterized by emotional dysregulation: PTSD, ADHD, anxiety, depression — these go hand in hand with addictive disorders.
Emotional states and physiology are intimately linked, and many drugs of abuse mimic chemicals that act directly upon these emotional circuits. A person who is addicted has found an external way to regulate their own physiology, which allows them to feel more in control of their negative emotions, which, feel ‘punishing’ in and of themselves.
The life-process learning disorder model of addiction takes an affective neuroscience approach in the recognition that addictive disorders develop as a learned response to a fundamental problem of emotional dysregulation. People who develop addictive disorders are not ‘addicts’ who need to ‘hit bottom’ in order to realize they are selfish and need God; they are people who are struggling with emotional dysregulation and have deeply learned to regulate their physiology and therefore emotional states through external sources like drugs.
A belief in God is a powerful way to cause changes to our own physiology. Prayer directly changes our physiology and therefore can allow us to better regulate our own emotional states, but developing a connection with God is the endgame of the human experience, and connecting with God is not the only way to develop the skills of emotional regulation, which we can also call self-regulation or self-control.
Talk therapy and other cognitive approaches deal with our thoughts, which are on the tertiary-process level of emotional processing. When talk therapy does work, much of it has to do with the fact that another person is there expressing CARE for us, which helps us to soothe negative emotional states. Stephen Porges, PhD refers to this as co-regulation of physiology: addicted peoples process their emotions with the help of a therapist or counselor. Co-regulation of physiology can lead to self-regulation of physiology, which is the end goal of therapy.
Co-regulation of emotional states, whether through the 12 step groups or a therapist, can lead to a feeling of safety, which down-regulates or turns down the volume on negative emotional circuits. This allows leads us to a kind of emotional ‘opening up’ through language. Our higher-thinking brain structures are an extension of our emotional structures; they allow us to further evaluate and judge risks and rewards through language. Language is what we use to express our emotions on the highest level; cognitive insights into our emotional states and emotional processing can lead to further cognitive control over our emotional states. These understandings illustrate the importance of a deeper re-balancing of these emotional states, circuits, and processes, which will continue to lead to problematic, maladaptive behavior when dysregulated, no matter how much we talk about ourselves and our problems.
The goal of talk therapy is often for a person to regain control over their ‘mind’; however, our ‘mind’ is powered by our emotions on an extremely fundamental level; our emotions are what moves us. Our emotions drive us. Our emotions create our motivations; emotions are both the engine of our consciousness and the color of the sky in the mental world that their energies generate.
Without our primary-process emotional circuits, we cease to be conscious. Without these emotional circuits, we don’t even eat. Therefore, it might be safe to say that talk therapy, when successful, succeeds due to a co-regulation over our thought processes that allows for a re-wiring and re-connection of our emotional-motivational engines to the higher-thinking frontal cortex and related structures. This co-regulation and assistance in re-wiring leads to a learning process that allows for an increase in ‘top-down’ self-regulation over emotional states and eventually cognitive processing, which leads to different emotional drives, different behavior, further learning, and the eventual establishment of new emotional and mental habits.
Understanding that addicted people are human beings that have fallen into a pattern of self-medication that is underscored by a fundamental dysregulation of emotional processing is crucial in ending the opioid epidemic. Understanding that these dysregulations in primary emotional processing and expression lead to further behavioral maladaptation in the secondary learning/memory systems that result in compulsive habits and addictions of all kinds will lead to breakthroughs in addiction treatment that don’t rely on cognitive, tertiary-process, ‘top-down’ talk therapies — though these therapies should not be dismissed out of hand.
Emotional processing is at the root of our addictions; it is time for us to discuss the kinds of ‘bottom-up’ treatments and strategies that will restore self-control and self-regulation to addicted people, of which no two are the same. We need more than just talk therapy and pharmacotherapy for these addicted people — we need neurofeedback and transcranial magnetic stimulation to become commonplace, first-line treatments for addictive disorders, among others.
This was a necessary introduction to Panksepp’s work and the ‘affective neuroscience’ perspective that informs the life-process learning disorder model of addictive disorders. In my next post, I discuss the primary-process emotional SEEKING system in more detail, which is crucial in understanding addictive disorders, along with other mental and emotional disorders of all kinds. The next post can be found here:
https://lonniejay.medium.com/the-seeking-system-dopamine-and-addictive-disorders-c91436859331
