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Motive or motivation is involved in behavior and learning "Emotion" can designate a variety of different phenomena. This section clarifies its meaning and other related ideas.
Clarification on what is meant by "emotions" and distinction between motivation and emotion. The various related terms, such as drives, instincts, affect, and so on.
[One of the muscles required for a natural smile, the orbicularis occuli, can only ne moved involuntarily.]
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 142
When he gave normal experimental subjects instructions on how to move their facial muscles, in effect “composing” a specific emotional expression on the subjects’ faces without their knowing his purpose, the result was that the subjects experienced a feeling appropriate to the expression….Curiously, not all parts of th....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 148
[People with a unilateral stroke in the motor area exhibit asymmetric facial control under normal voluntary control. When the patient smiles spontaneously, however, the smile is symmetric.]
This illustrates that the motor control for an emotion-related movement sequence is not in the same location as the con....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 140
We cannot mimic easily what the anterior cingulate can achieve effortlessly [a natural smile]; we have no easy neural route to exert volitional control over the anterior cingulate.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 141-2
[Acting is hard.] “Method” acting…relies on having actors generate an emotion, create the real thing rather than simulate it. This can be more convincing and engaging, but it requires special talent and maturity to rein in the automated processes unleashed by the real emotion.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 142
[“Drives and instincts” arise from these ancient structures, “designed” by evolution to promote the survival of the organism.]
In general, drives and instincts operate either by generating a particular behavior directly or by inducing physiological states that lead individuals to behave in a particular way, mindles....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 115
I will accept the likelihood that other animals do have internal feelings we Commonly label as emotions, even though the cognitive consequences of those states probably vary widely from species to species. This empirically defensible assumption will allow me to utilize information derived from simpler brains to highligh....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 4
The most primal affective-cognitive interaction in humans, and presumably other animals as well, is encapsulated in the phrases “I want” and "I don’t want.” These assertions are reflected in basic tendencies to approach and avoid various real-life phenomena. However, there are several distinct ways to like and dislike e....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 27
Taking a somewhat more complex view are those who recognize that behavioral arousal can take you away from objects or toward objects, so the next simplified level of analysis accepts only the dichotomous distinction of approach versus avoidance. To this day, many are still attracted by the stark simplicity of such dimen....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 46
This book is premised on the belief that the common emotional words we learned as children—being angry, scared, sad, and happy—can serve the purpose [of understanding reality] better than many psychologists are inclined to believe.
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 13
our initial taxonomies [of basic emotions] must be quite conservative and for the time being open-ended. At the simplest level, world events can produce approach or withdrawal, but careful analysis of the evidence now suggests that both of these broad categories contain a variety of separable, albeit inter....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 14
Many generations of psychologists who tried to discuss internal processes with folk psychological words found it impossible to agree on essential matters, such as what are we really talking about when we assert that someone did something because they felt this way or that way? It took psychologists some time to realize....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 13
No longer were mere verbal concepts and unseen attributes of mind a sufficient basis for explaining behavior. Rather, behavior was seen to arise from objective occurrences and contingencies in the environment. Lawful relations were finally established between specific environmental events and patterns of behavior emitte....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 22
We instinctively read the dynamic between two people simply from their tension or relaxation, their postures and tone of voice, their changing facial expressions.
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 75
Behaviors to avoid or escape from danger have clearly evolved to render each organism competitive in terms of survival. But inappropriately prolonged escape or avoidance behavior would put the animal at a disadvantage in that successful species preservation demands reproduction which, in turn, depends upon feeding, shel....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 75-6
How many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behavior, start as attempts to cope with the unbearable physicaLpain of our_ emotions?
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 76
What is less well-known is that in 1924 Pavlov made another momentous scientific discovery related to trauma. The thaw in St. Petersburg during the spring of that year caused the River Neva to flood Pavlov’s basement laboratory, inundating the cages of his experimental dogs who were trapped in the icy water with no mean....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 77
Being in tune with other members of our species via the VVC is enormously rewarding. What begins as the attuned play of mother and child continues with the rhy thmicity of a good basketball game, the synchrony of tango dancing, and the harmony of choral singing or playing a piece of jazz or chamber music—all of which fo....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 86
As we have seen, the job of the brain is to constantly monitor and evaluate what is going on within and around us. These evaluations are transmitted by chemical messages in the bloodstream and electrical messages in our nerves, causing subtle or dramatic changes throughout the body and brain. These shifts usually occur....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 96
[Trauma is remember not through narrative memory but by traumatic memory.]
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 178-80
Emotive circuits change sensory, perceptual, and cognitive processing, and initiate a host of physiological changes that are naturally synchronized with the aroused behavioral tendencies characteristic of emotional experience
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 49
The innate emotional systems interact with higher brain systems so extensively that in the normal animal there is probably no emotional state that is free of cognitive ramifications.
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 26
With affective feelings, other important, but as yet unstudied, internal representations may be the anchor points for felt experience. For instance, the reference process for specific emotional states may be the arousal of specific neurochemical circuits and anatomical areas of the brain. Furthermore, the actual generat....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 31
[The categorical or psychobiological view of emotions has emotions that are mediated by brain circuits (in the primitive or limbic brain) which interact strongly with autonomic processes and weakly with cognitive perceptual processes.
The social-constructivist view is an alternative.] Those who are convinced that hu....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 44-5
[The dimensions of approach/avoidance and salience are important but don't reflect basic brain emotional circuits. Also, they may be cognitive generalizations of emotional experience.]
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 46
[emotions motivate certain behaviors over others.]
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 53
It has traditionally been assumed that feelings and other mental processes are immaterial and hence cannot act as material causes for anything else. Also, it has been difficult to see why internally experienced emotional states would be needed for immediate behavioral control. Neural explanations without any psychologic....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 32
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