Primary and Secondary Emotions


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Meta description

Complex emotions are a feature of human life. It is useful to distinguish between basic emotions and those that are the result of cognitive appraisals. In addition, some emotional reactions are wired into our brains.

Title Memo

Our powerful human neocortex allows appraisal of events, which results in emotional conclusions, i.e., emotions-about. These emotions-about in turn affect cognition. These can be termed "secondary" emotions. Primary and secondary emotions, how they are created, where in the brain they are created, the time-lines of emotion creation and relevance. How secondary emotions are formed. How memories are kept. How they affect cognition.

Note Text: 1648 Primary and secondary emotional processing

As I see it, damage to the limbic system impairs the processing of primary emotion; damage to prefrontal cortices compromises the processing of secondary emotion. [From brain damage evidence. Therefore, primary and secondary use different processing.]

Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 139-40

Note Text: 1647 Secondary emotions, amygdala and ACC

[Secondary emotions are constructed by a combination and conjunction of images reconstructed from memory and primary and secondary reactions to them, both remembered and current. These secondary reactions are more idiosyncratic than primary emotions. A diagram appearing on p. 137 describes the process. Secondary reactio....

Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 136-7

Note Text: 1894 Affective interpretations as attributions

Obviously, those higher interpretations that eventually come to surround our emotional states (let us call them “attributions,” as is so common) can only emerge from higher brain functions. [AKA appraisals?]

Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 32

Note Text: 1898 Appraisal is complex

Affective consciousness may not be as important in instigating rapid emotional responses as it is in longer-term psychobehavioral strategies.

Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 34

Note Text: 1839 Basic emotional systems overlaid by cognition

It is partly because the actions of those ancient brain systems are very difficult to see clearly within our own behavior patterns, especially through the complex cognitive prisms of the human cortex that generate, subtle behavioral strategies and layers of learning and culture that are uniquely human.

Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 4

Note Text: 1819 Memories evolve in deep and REM sleep

Today we know that both deep sleep and REM sleep play important roles in how memories change over time. The sleeping brain reshapes memory by increasing the imprint of emotionally relevant information while helping irrelevant material fade away. In a series of elegant studies Stickgold and his colleagues showed that the....

Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 262

Note Text: 1867 Demonstration of innate fear suppressing play

In this experiment, young rats were first allowed five-minute play periods on four successive days, and then on the fifth, half were exposed to a small tuft of cat hair on the floor of their “playroom.” During that session, play was completely inhibited. The animals moved furtively, cautiously sniffing the fur and other....

Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 18

Note Text: 1917 Emotion vs mood

When powerful waves of affect overwhelm our sense of ourselves in the world, we say that we are experiencing an emotion. When similar feelings are more tidal—weak but persistent—we say we are experiencing a mood.

Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 47

Note Text: 1909 Fancy emotions not basic

[Many emotions, especially social emotions, are recent elaborations.]

Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 42

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