A Short-Cut to Understanding Affect Neuroscience, Lucy Bevin (2022)

Infantile Repression Refuted

In 1993, a famous custody battle occurred in which a two-year-old girl who had been adopted at birth was now being ordered to return to her biological mother. Many mental health experts predicted that this new custody arrangement would be devastating for the girl. These experts based their thinking on the John Bowlby’s teachings; Bowlby had referred to the findings of Rene Spitz (who found that institutionalized infant who often developed infections and died prematurely), Lorentz (whose imprinting studies found that goslings followed him around as though he were their mother), and Harlow (who found that baby monkeys preferred a terrycloth “mother” without milk to a metal “mother” with milk).

Some of Bowlby’s contemporaries disagreed with him, mostly notably Anna Freud and James Robertson. Robertson found that young children could be separated from their mothers for 1-2 weeks without distress, the key seeming to be that the children were gradually introduced to the new family over a period of time. The girl in the 1993 custody was similarly gradually introduced to her biological mother and she ended up adjusting well.

Bowlby’s belief that such a separation would cause emotional harm was based on Freud’s theory of infantile repression. Freud believed that infant memories do not disappear but simply get repressed. “According to Freud, when the orphaned babies in the Spitz studies grew older, they would retain unconscious memories of their motherless desolation.” However, neuroscientists have shown that Freud’s theory was wrong, as the hippocampus “creates enduring personal memories, but it does not begin to function until a child is about four years old. Babies and young children can retain short-term memories, but the neural pathways that encode these memories dissolve after a few weeks or months and the children forget.”

Nonetheless, as Spitz demonstrated, “people can be damaged by infantile experiences that they cannot remember.” Bevin provides three “explanations for unremembered damage.” (1) Stress arouses the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), “which directs an initial fight-or-flight response to danger.” If the SNS is aroused for prolonged periods of time, the person can suffer harmful effects, one of these effects caused by “the overproduction of cortisol, which suppresses the immune system.” (2) Stress also arouses the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis). “Chronic HPA axis overarousal produces a host of deleterious effects,” including anxiety, depression, cognitive impairments, and the destruction of muscles and blood vessels. (3) Maternal separation causes a decrease in opioid activity, which leads to depression.

Most neuroscientists “see emotion as a purely physiological response” and affects as “private conscious experiences that we cannot directly perceive in others.” “Once we identify the emotional profile, we experience the corresponding affect.”

Theories of Emotion

Feedback Theory

According to the James-Lange model, certain physiological changes are fed back to the cognitive cortex (“the outer layer of the brain”), which in turn identifies these physiological changes as a specific emotion. Once we identify this emotion, “we experience the corresponding affect.” So, for example, if I hear a gunshot, my body will “undergo an immediate and involuntary emotional response,” “stress chemicals” proliferating in my bloodstream, my heartbeat accelerating, my body ducking and freezing, etc. Only once I recognized that these physiological responses corresponded to fear would could I be said to feel frightened.

Put differently, we have formed a concept about different emotions, and when we have certain physiological responses, we’re able to identify them as fear because we have a concept about fear. This ability to form concepts is only possible for intelligent beings. “The neocortex is the outer layer of the brain that has most recently evolved. The frontal region of the neocortex, known as the prefrontal cortex (PFC), is the cognitive part of the brain,” the part of the brain that makes us so intelligent.

“Modern feedback theorists maintain that brain regions below the neocortex generate emotional-physiological responses” — the allocortex (“the part of the cortex that evolved before the neocortex”) and the subcortical regions of the brain (below the allocortex). Included in the subcortical region is the amygdala, which initiates fear responses “by responding to threatening stimuli and by sending information downward to the hypothalamus and then further down to the periaqueductal gray (PAG), which is located in the upper brainstem.” Among other things, the hypothalamus causes change in blood pressure, and the PAG causes us to freeze.

Arguments against feedback theory. (1) Walter Cannon criticized feedback theory by “noting that visceral responses develop slowly while we experience affects right away.” However, his argument is not valid, as we now know that “some emotional behaviors, like freezing, fleeing, smiling, and stereotypical body postures, occur immediately.” Bivens presents four additional arguments against feedback theory. (2) The cognitive cortex is “inactive during periods of affective arousal and active during unemotional states,” thus showing that “the cognitive cortex does not generate affects.” During times of high arousal — e.g., high stress or happiness — “there is reduced neural activity in these prefrontal areas.” (3) The opiate effect. (4) Neuroimaging has shown that it takes longer to “process a concept” (700-800 milliseconds) than to “generate affective feelings” (500 milliseconds). “If cognitive concepts generated affects, affects could not emerge before conceptualization.” (5) Split-brain patients.

The Conceptual Act Theory

CAT, devised by Lisa Feldman Barrett, claims that emotional systems do not exist...

Brainstem Theory

Jaak Panksepp argued that all mammalian brains have seven inborn emotional systems: “SEEKING (enthused curiosity), FEAR (typically of physical danger or death), RAGE (in the face of threat or frustration), LUST (the sexual urge), GRIEF (misery in the face of social isolation), CARE (the urge to nurture), PLAY (friendly competition).” He capitalized the words of each system to emphasize that these systems are not just “metaphorical descriptions” but physical entities, each consisting of “identifiable brain structures” and “fueled with specific brain chemicals.”

As evidence that these systems are inborn, there are nearly 200 anthropological studies showing that “people from different cultures can accurately label the emotional meaning of facial expressions); e.g., primitive New Guinea societies that had no contact with the outside world “were able to match a word with an expressive face.” This is evidence that emotions are universal, and if they’re universal, then it seems to follow that they’re “hardwired in the human brain.”

These emotional systems “are found in the upper brainstem and in the midline part of the cortex. The brain evolved from the bottom up and from midline to more lateral areas, meaning that subcortical structures evolved before the cortex and that midline parts of the cortex evolved before its lateral parts.” All mammals contain these emotional systems, and “[t]he brains of many other vertebrates contain some of these systems.”

Bevin then says that two important constituents of consciousness, wakefulness and motivation, come from subcortical brain features. (1) Wakefulness. Researchers Giuseppi Moruzzi and Horace Magoun found that if a cat’s cortex, but not its brainstem, is destroyed, it will remain awake but that the converse is not true (meaning if its brainstem, but not its cortex, is destroy, it will not remain awake). They identified the part of the brainstem responsible for this, the recticular activating system (RAS). Two other researchers, Penfield and Jasper, replicated these results “in human beings undergoing brain surgery.” (2) Motivation. Other researchers have found that “[t]he lower the level of destruction, the more completely was motivated, purposeful behavior obliterated.” One example that our motivation comes from our subcortical regions comes from pain research. The sensory-discriminative pathway, located higher up in the brain, gives us certain information about pain (e.g., where in the body it’s located) but does not involve suffering. The affective-motivational pathway, located lower in the brain, “generates the ouch factor — the experience of pain and suffering.” Many of the parts of the brain that “cause physical pain and suffering overlap with brain structures that generate empathy with people who are in physical pain.”

More evidence that emotions come from subcortical regions of the brain. (1) Rats are unintelligent, their PFC being rudimentary or perhaps even non-existent. But even though they probably cannot generate “cognitive concepts, they approach, or avoid, certain stimuli, indicating that they either like, or dislike them.” Additionally, the “exhibit place preferences, a tendency to revisit, or avoid places where they have had positive, or negative experiences, again indicating that they liked and disliked those experiences. They will, for example, revisit places where they had sex but avoid places where they ate tainted food.” These preferences “indicate that rats like sex and dislike tainted food. Since rats are so unintelligent, these affective responses must emanate from noncognitive subcortical structures in rat brains.” (2) Animals who have had their cortexes removed also display place preferences, “indicating that they, too, have affective experiences.” (3) Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex but “appear to be affectively conscious.” “They laugh when positively engaged, they cry and arch their backs, indicating when they are uncomfortable, and they select favorite toys with which to play.”

Summary: “Brainstem theory claims that when animals exhibit emotional behavior, they have affective feelings. When a mother cat licks her kittens, she harbors protective maternal feelings. When dogs copulate, they feel lustful. When animals fight, they are enraged. But animals cannot tell us how they feel. How can we be sure they are affective creatures?” Panksepp’s triangulated approach: If you stimulate the same emotional system in my brain and an animal’s brain, we would both exhibit the same emotional response; by telling you how I feel, we can assume that the animal felt the same way.

Damasio’s Hypothesis

Damasio studied patients who had suffered damage to a specific part of the PFC, the vmPFC. He found that these individuals have no problems thinking logically but that they nonetheless struggled to make sound decisions. During a rigged card game, normal subjects would carry out “unconscious cognitive processes,” and consequently, when they played a bad deck would experience such physiological responses as sweating. The subjects with vmPFC did not experience these physiological responses and as a result did not perform as well. Damasion called these responses somatic markers, and he concluded that these somatic markers, “rather than reason, provides a gut-level conscious feeling that guides sound decisions.”

Homeostasis “involves many physical systems in the body that work cooperatively in order to insure good health and survival of the individual.” Homeostatic balance “feels good, and imbalance feels bad. Since feelings of pleasure and pain provide motivation that is an essential feature of consciousness, Damasio concluded that homeostasis is a somatic marker that is fundamental to consciousness.” Damasion identified the brain structures that “monitor, maintain and restore homeostasis,” a few structures around the upper brainstem.

Along with linking consciousness to homeostasis, he linked consciousness to the sense of self. He noted that homeostasis must be stable in order to sustain life; e.g., “if our body temperature rises by only a few degrees, we will become ill and might die.” Similarly, the sense of self must be stable. “You do not wake up in the morning thinking you are someone else. You retain a continuous sense of who you are.” He hypothesized that the subcortical regions that regulate homeostatic ability are the same regions that regulate the sense of self.

He believed that the psyche is creating different types of neural maps. (1) Our “subcortical protoself structures” take note when stimuli cause homeostatic changes and create maps of the homeostatic body. (2) Our cortex (mind) takes notes of perceptual input and create mind maps. When protoself maps and mind maps combine, three things happen: (a) the protoself becomes conscious and “feelings pleasure or pain that reflect homeostatic balance,” (b) the protoself realizes that “a particular stimulus has caused the good or bad feeling,” (c) “the protoself becomes a protagonist with a sense of self.”

Example: I’m at the beach on a hot day and feel a cool breeze. (1) “My protoself unconsciously maps homeostatic changes caused by the breeze, namely the restoration of thermal homeostasis.” (2) My mind “maps objective features of the breeze: its strength, fragrance, direction, etc.” My protoself maps and mind maps combine: (a) “my protoself becomes conscious of the pleasant cooling of my body,” (b) the protoself “has the feeling of knowing that the breeze has made me feel good,” and (c) my protoself acquires a sense of self. “Thus it is I — my self — who knows that I feel good and knows that the breeze has made me feel good.”

“Without memory, neither consciousness of pleasure and pain, the feeling of knowing, nor a sense of self can be sustained over time.” Many non-human animals can, “like us, experience feelings of pleasure and pain, a sense of knowing what has caused pleasure/pain, and a sense of self. But their brains are incapable of creating connected memories of ongoing events.” Consequently, these animals “live in the present, and they do not experience a narrative stream of consciousness.” …

Three Types of Affects

“Panksepp states that affects encompass all conscious experiences of pleasure and pain, which he places into three categories: emotional affects, homeostatic affects, and sensory affects.”

Homeostatic Affects

“Homeostatic affects are feelings like hunger, thirst, satiation, urges to urinate, defecate, etc."

Sensory Affects

“Sensory affects occur in response to stimuli outside or inside the body. This includes sweet and sour taste, good or bad odor, the experience of rough or smooth textures, pain associated with tissue damage, etc.”

Emotional Affects

Emotional affects are feelings that occur when one or more emotional system is arousd. An emotional system can be aroused by a stimulus. “Each emotional system consists of assemblies of individual neurons, which exhibit large-scale rhythmic oscillatory patterns of firing when neurons in the assembly fire synchronously.” Each emotional system “generates large-scale synchronous oscillations whose rhythm serves as its signature. The signature neural rhythm of the FEAR system might be a tight staccato or shivery cadence; the signature rhythm of the CARE system might be slow and gentle; PLAY might be a buoyant, skipping tempo; the negative side of grief might be like convulsive sobs or a high-pitched wail, etc.” 

(1) SEEKING

Homeostasis is a balance in one’s internal state and includes such factors as “temperature, blood pressure, levels of sugar, oxygen, and calcium as well as circadian rhythms within the body.” While being in homeostasis is pleasurable, the SEEKING system involves pleasurable feelings that are only attained when we’re not in homeostasis.

The SEEKING system is located in the dopamine/mesolimbic pathway. This pathway contains the lateral hypothalamus and medial forebrain bundle as well as the part of the brain responsible for dopamine production. The lateral hypothalamus/medial forebrain bundle has been the subject of some important research findings:

1. In the 1970s, James Olds and Peter Milner hooked up electrodes to this bundle and gave animals access to a lever that, if pushed, would stimulate this bundle. Once animals learned about the lever, they would press it “in a frenzied manner to the point of exhaustion, or even death in order to self-stimulate” this part of the brain.
2. Later researchers later found that if they stimulated an animal’s lateral hypothalamus/medial forebrain bundle but gave the animal, not a lever, but access to food or water, the animal would keep consuming the food and water. The animals, in other words, were not trying to maintain homeostasis but instead engaging in “excited, obsessive behavior” and would sometimes do things “compulsively gnaw on wood” or “excitedly preen by carrying their tails around.”
3. When animals are in a state of homeostatic imbalance (e.g., hungry or thirsty), the lateral hypothalamus/medial forebrain bundle is aroused. However, as soon as they begin to restore homeostasis (e.g., by eating or drinking), “these brain structures shut down.”
4. When animals take drugs that prolong dopamine activity (e.g., cocaine and methamphetamine), “they exhibit the same enthused frenetic behavior that Olds and Milner observed.”

Since homeostasis is pleasurable and since the lateral hypothalamus/medial forebrain bundle produces pleasure when we’re not in homeostasis, Panksepp concluded that the SEEKING system provides an affective pleasure.

“When the mesolimbic pathway is electrically stimulated in the human brain, or when people take cocaine, or meth, they do not describe the relaxed sense of satisfaction and contentment after a good meal, a deep drink on a hot day, or the glow following sexual consummation. Rather, they report a high-hearted sense of anticipation when they are looking forward to those rewards. This enthused sense of anticipation is attended by feelings of personal agency — the sense that they can make things happen in the world.”

We all know that “states of hunger, thirst, cold, or heat are unpleasant,” but “even when we are in a state of unsatisfied craving, we often experience anticipatory pleasures with which we are all familiar. Before Sunday lunch, we relish the scent of a roast cooking in the oven, even though we experience pangs of hunger. The anticipation of meeting a lover can be almost as keen as the reunion itself. Conversely, after successfully completing project on a long project, our sense of satisfaction is sometimes mixed with a depressing letdown because we no longer enjoy the enthusiasm of working toward a goal.”

Panksepp called the dopamine/mesolimbic pathway the SEEKING system “because when animals are given free arousal of the mesolimbic pathway — when they do not have to work in order to obtain electrical stimulation and when they are not provided with food, or drink — they immediately explore the environment with purpose and enthusiasm. Rats sniff vigorously, which they typically do when they are looking for something — when they are seeking.”

“SEEKING arousal provides an affective reward characterized by euphoric anticipation, curiosity, a sense of personal agency, and a willingness to take risks.” “Overarousal of the SEEKING system can cause people to gamble, overeat, chain-smoke, or engage in sexual promiscuity. On the other end of the scale, a dearth of dopamine causes depressive lethargy.”

(2) FEAR

This system “generates a negative affective state from which all people and animals wish to escape. It engenders tension in the body and a shivery immobility at milder levels of arousal, which can intensify and burst forth into a dynamic flight pattern with chaotic projectile movement to get out of harm’s way.”

(3) RAGE

This system “causes animals to propel their bodies toward offending objects, and they bite, scratch, and pound with their extremities. Rage is fundamentally a negative affect, but it can become positive when it results in victory over one’s opponents or in the control and subjugation of others.”

(4) LUST

SEEKING is one reward system; another is the LUST system. “Olds and Milner discovered that animals would also work for stimulation of the septal area” (located just above the hypothalamus), an area that “generates sexual responses in both people and animals.” As with the SEEKING system, the rewards of the LUST system are non-homeostatic, meaning that the reward it provides is affective. “LUST arousal is not essential for homeostatic regulation and survival.”

(5) CARE

This system creates “the impulse to envelop loved ones with general caresses and tender ministrations. It is typified by maternal care, and without this system, looking after the young would be a burden. Instead, nurturing can be profoundly rewarding. In extreme cases, CARE arouses the impulse to protect others even at the expense of one’s own safety.”

(6) GRIEF/SOCIAL BONDING

This system generates both good and bad feelings. “The bad feelings are a panicky misery that people and animals experience when they are socially isolated or rejected. The negative side of GRIEF can produce a deep psychic wound.” When GRIEF is intense for children, “misery reaches a panicky level, and they cry insistently, urgently trying to reunite with their caretakers.” “If reunion is not achieved, the baby or young child gradually begins to display sorrowful and despairing bodily postures that reflect the brain cascade from panic into persistent depression.”

This system “also produces feelings of joyful contentment when people and animals benefit from the affectionate support of family and friends. This sense of social belonging endenders a sense of well-being.” LUST, CARE, and this positive side of GRIEF are all sources of love.

(7) PLAY

This system “is expressed in bouncy and bounding lightness of movement where participants often poke — or rib — each other in rapidly alternating patterns. At times, PLAY resembles aggression, especially when PLAY takes the form of wrestling.” PLAY might initially look like aggression, but a close examination reveals differently. Both participants “enjoy the activity. When children or animals play, they usually take turns at assuming dominant and submissive roles.” Experiments have found that participants will continue the play as long as the loser ends up on top at least 30 percent of the time. “When both the top dog and the underdog accept this kind of handicapping, the participants continue to have fun and enjoy this social activity.” This system helps animals “learn basic skills” (e.g., chasing string helps a kitten develop skills that it will ultimately use to catch mice) and helps us to learn social roles. It is “one of the main sources of friendship.”

Neuroscience and Mental Health

Panksepp’s Taxonomy of Basic Motives

Different theorists have speculated about different basic motivations; Freud posited libido (LUST) and aggression (RAGE), Bowlby added attachment, Kohut added self-esteem. “Panksepp’s taxonomy is more reliable because it identifies brain structures fueled by specific chemicals that result in stereotypical emotional behaviors. We can observe these phenomena and agree upon their existence. Additionally, his taxonomy provides a greater repertoire of basic motivations than does psychotherapeutic theory.”

Panksepp himself acknowledged that his taxonomy might not be complete. We might have an emotional system of disgust, although this circuit has not yet been found. “The urge for power and social dominance also appears to be a primary emotion because almost all animals organize into social hierarchies. Yet neuroscientific research has not identified discreet circuitry or chemistry for social dominance.”

Freud believed that children become attached to their mothers because the mother provides libidinal gratification; libido, he believed, was not overtly sexual and that libido could also be “gratified by the intake of nutrition and by the pleasures of receiving maternal care.” Panksepp has shown that people like Fairbairn and Bowlby are right and that “the need for attachment is a non-libidinal expression of the GRIEF system. Similarly, the PLAY and CARE systems generate nonsexual attachments.”

More Thoughts on Emotions

Two Types of Anxiety

Evidence for the GRIEF system came from experiments revealing “that electrical stimulation of specific brain structures caused animals to cry out in distress.” These structures include “the periaqueductal gray (PAG) located in the upper brainstem,” “portions of the hypothalamus, the thalamus, parts of the stria terminalis, located just above the thalamus,” certain parts of the amygdala, and in higher vertebrates the cingulate cortex (located in the middle of the cerebral cortex). “These structures are active in the brains of young animals when they are separated from their mothers and cry. These same structures are also substrates for depression and sadness in human beings.”

“Unlike GRIEF, the FEAR system, which extends upward from the PAG to parts of the hypothalamus and the central nucleus of the amygdala, is typically aroused in anticipation of physical injury or death, but can be afraid of any impending adverse event, like a final exam or a tax audit.” “The GRIEF and FEAR systems respond to different medications.” The antidepressant imipramine reduces GRIEF but not FEAR. “Benzodiazepines, like Valium, assuage the FEAR of danger, but they have only a modest effect in quelling panic attacks,” which might be manifestations of GRIEF.

Two Ways to Feel Good and Two Ways to Feel Bad

GRIEF has a positive side that “generates contented feelings of comfort and joy in the supportive company of friends and family.” Brain chemicals like opioids and oxytocin activate these positive feelings. GRIEF also has a negative side that “generates misery, loneliness, and depression when we are abandoned, betrayed, or defeated.” Brain chemicals like glutamate and corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) activate these negative feelings.

“The SEEKING system is fueled by dopamine.” “Drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine promote dopamine activity, and recovering addicts typically experience depression when their brains are deprived of dopamine.”

The Importance of Play

Aggression is Not Pleasurable

Free Associations

The Creation of Free Associations

Freud found that free associations reveal unconscious thoughts and wishes. “LeDoux’s rat conditioning experiments explain why free associations make sense and why they are so important in psychotherapy.” “At birth, people and animals have emotional responses to a small repertoire of stimuli.” Humans, for example, are born with a fear of heights, spiders, and snakes. “The six other emotional systems also respond innately to a small number of stimuli. Social isolation arouses GRIEF, certain pheromones arouse LUST, frustration arouses RAGE, and exposure to very young animals of the same species elicits CARE, even in male adolescents. Danger arouses FEAR. Novel situations can also arouse low levels of FEAR, but they also can arouse the SEEKING system. Rough-and-tumble fun prompts the urge to PLAY.”

LeDoux’s conditioning experiments explain “how the small repertoire of stimuli to which an animal inherently reacts expands exponentially.” When a shock is paired with a tone, a rat learns to fear the tone. The amygdala generates the fear response. The rat remembers the painful stimulus, and it also “comes to fear a variety of contextual or background stimuli” — e.g., “the sound of the spinning wheel in its cage, the smell of the sawdust, or the sight of the approaching researcher.”

“Conditioning to contextual stimuli is vital to survival.” Bevin asks us to imagine an urban rat who becomes afraid to go near a house because it smells a cat. “If the cat wore a bell, the rat would soon learn to fear the sound of the bell. The rat might also learn to fear the sound of the cat’s meow, the sight of the cat’s toys, and the sound of its owner’s voice when he calls the cat for dinner. By avoiding these stimuli, the rat keeps safely away from the cat.”

All of these stimuli — “the smell of the cat, the sound of its bell, the sight of the cat’s toys, and the sound of the owner’s voice” — are associated. We generally think of associations as occurring between ideas; so, for example, we might think that “when the rat hears the sound of the bell, it thinks about the smell of the cat and becomes frightened.” But “conditioned and contextual stimuli are not associated on the basis ideas.” Evidence #1: Experiments have shown that dogs and rats whose “cortices have been surgically removed can be conditioned even though their brains cannot process ideas.” Evidence #2: “Hydranencephalitic children who are born without a cortex can also be conditioned.”

And so for the urban rat, “the bell, meow, toys, and the owner’s voice are associated because their encoding neural pathways project to the central nucleus of the amygdala, which is part of the rat’s FEAR system. These stimuli are associated because they all elicit the same emotional/affective response, namely fear. Unintelligent animals, like rats, probably cannot make ideational associations between stimuli. Probably, the urban rat is just as afraid of the bell, the meow, the toys, and the owner’s voice. That is enough to keep it alive.”

Conditioning and Cognitive Associations

When humans are emotionally aroused, they have thoughts, “and these thoughts become part and parcel of affective experience.” Example: When the FEAR system is aroused, the amygdala is active 🠆 Amygdala activity “mobilizes cortical attention, and we take notice of things around us” 🠆 “The cortex sends information about the environment to the hippocampus.”

Example: Imagine you were walking down the street, “perhaps musing about a few things that you need to buy,” and then heard a gunshot. You froze and then ducked “behind some dustbins in the alley next to a Chinese restaurant.” Your cortex then noticed the dustbins, and you smelt the Chinese food. “Your cortex sent information about these stimuli to your hippocampus. Your amygdala facilitated activity in your hippocampus, which sent integrated information about the environment to your prefrontal cortex which generated cognitive thoughts about the environment.”

In the days that followed, the following things then happened. Your wife brought you Chinese food for dinner, “but when you breathed in the aroma of the food, you suddenly felt agitated and had no appetite. The next morning when you went out to empty the trash, you felt anxious when you approached your own dustbins. The following week when you happened to walk down the street where you heard the shot, you felt nervous, even though all about was calm.”

You might suppose that all these stimuli upset you “because they reminded you of the shooting incident that frightened you.” But that would not be the case. “Fear conditioning is achieved the same way in both people and other animals — including unintelligent rats and decorticate animals.” “Information about the smell of the Chinese food, the sight of the dustbins, and a city street was encoded in neural pathways that projected to” the central nucleus of your amygdala. “Because you are intelligent, your amygdala facilitated the creation of thoughts about the unconditioned, conditioned, and contextual stimuli. But any thoughts you had about the relationships between these stimuli occurred after conditioning had already occurred.”

These associations are different than cognitive associations. An example of a cognitive association: After the gunshot incident, you read in the paper that the street in which you heard the gunshot is a hotspot for drug trafficking. “You would make a cognitive connection between the information that you read in the paper and the gunman whom you saw. You might conclude that the gunshot was probably a drug deal gone bad. On the basis of this cognitive association, you might avoid this part of town.”

“We have conditioning experiences all the time.” “Consider a baby who innately bonds to mother. As time goes by, stimuli like the sound of mother’s voice, the smell of her perfume, the food she cooks, and the texture of her clothes all become things which arouse the baby’s love, joy, and longing.” These associations “make sense when we understand that they all elicit the same emotional response, namely a love and longing for mother. When clients come to therapy, they present a jumble of disparate ideas that seem confusing, but they make sense if a therapist can discern the underlying affects that connect them.”

Psychotherapy

Fear (and other emotional responses) can be extinguished — e.g., by “by repeatedly subjecting the rat to the tone without any accompanying shock.” Extinction cannot usually be achieved if attempted soon after conditioning but has more success the more time has passed, suggesting that “conditioning circuitry deteriorates during this interval.” “Extinction circuitry occurs in medial parts of the rat’s prefrontal cortex and within the amygdala itself.” Even after extinction has been achieved, the fear response can be revived if the rat is again shocked or even if the rat is subjected to stress. This suggests that the “circuitry created during the conditioning persists.” Extinction then does not erase the conditioning circuitry but “creates new circuitry that competes with the fear-generating pathways.”

Psychotherapy is like extinction. Imagine a boy whose father had always been tyrannical, arousing his RAGE system. The boy starts to regularly argue with his classmates and teachers and later in life with his boss. “Psychotherapy would help the man to understand that his anger with his boss is really about his father. This would allow him to see his boss as a separate person instead of unconsciously conflating him with his father.” Put differently, these insights “would be a learning process that extinguishes the man’s inappropriate anger.” “The RAGE circuitry would deteriorate over time, but it would continue to exist, rendering the man vulnerable to relapse during times of stress.”

LeDoux’s fear studies show us “how the cortex inhibits emotional arousal.” “The central nucleus of the amygdala, which inaugurates the fear response (freezing, hypertension, pupil dilation, etc.), receives information via two pathways,” the high road and the low road. The fear stimuli initially goes to the thalamus. The high road goes from the thalamus to the cortex, where information is further processed, and then the information goes from the cortex to the amygdala. The low road goes from the thalamus directly to the amygdala. There are fewer synapses on the short road, so information gets there faster.

Example of the two roads. You’re walking down the street and suddenly hear blaring rock music from a car driving by. The low road: the thalamus sends this stimuli information to the amygdala, which cannot make sense of the noise, and initiates a fear response, causing you to feel startled and moving “to duck into a nearby alley.” The thalamus also sends this information to your cortex, where it is processed, that is, understood to be only music, and then sent to the amygdala, and as a result, you calm down.

“LeDoux’s high/low road experiments demonstrate that information provided by the cortex can inhibit emotional expression. Psychotherapy is largely a cognitive process where the cortices of both therapist and client engage in a joint effort to make sense of the client’s problems. In order to do this, the client needs to engage in rational thinking, a process that entails a degree of emotional control. In order to control one’s emotions, the cortex needs to inhibit them — at least temporarily.”

The cortex is responsible for inhibiting our emotions, and it does not do this as effectively when the prefrontal cortex is weakened or injured or when a person is chronically stressed. Moreover, as LeDeux wrote, there are more connections from the amygdala to to the prefrontal cortex than from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, meaning that “the amygdala has a robust capacity to arouse fearful thoughts and perceptions in the neocortex, but the neocortex has less ability to inhibit fear.”

“Chronic and/or extreme emotional arousal can occur when emotional systems become sensitized by experience. If a rat is repeatedly exposed to a cat, the exposure causes synaptic plasticity and the creation of long-term memory pathways between the central nucleus of the rat’s amygdala and its periaqueducal gray (PAG) as well as within the PAG itself.” With repeated exposures to the cat, it will become “excessively anxious and fearful.” Thus, the FEAR system becomes sensitized. Further, certain brain chemicals are excessively produced.

Conflict and Deficit

Neuroscience supports both the conflict and deficit models. “Support for the classical model is found in Panksepp’s taxonomy, which demonstrates that human beings, like all mammals, have hardwired emotional LUST and RAGE systems that correspond to the classical id drives of libido and aggression. The neocortex, which is the cognitive part of the brain, roughly corresponds to the ego and generally serves to inhibit emotional systems.”

The deficit model holds that “insecure attachment to mother or insufficient validation of a child’s worth could create deficits,” that is, “injuries to the personality.” The deficit model holds that “cure is not necessarily a matter of unveiling unconscious defenses and id impulses” but healing “through the therapeutic relationship in which the therapist’s expression of empathy is of paramount importance. It is through the therapeutic relationship that the client achieves personal maturation that corrects deficit and effects cure.”

“Panksepp’s taxonomy also supports the deficit model,” as it contains more systems than just LUST and RAGE. Emotional systems like LUST, CARE, PLAY, SEEKING, and the positive side of GRIEF “yield pleasure and do not necessarily cause conflict. Other systems like FEAR, RAGE, and the negative side of GRIEF are inherently painful.” The FEAR system “can become sensitized by experience. Thus, one can see sensitization as an emotional injury or deficit.” All emotional systems can be sensitized, which means that “the results can be felicitous. If the positive side of your GRIEF system is sensitized, you will be happy. The same claim can be made for the PLAY, SEEKING, and CARE systems.”

Bevin argues against therapists who try to be neutral or blank screens, writing the neurosciences shows that neutrality is impossible. As neutral faces causes clients to feel anxious.

Psychotherapists have tended to focus on the GRIEF system and ignore the SEEKING system. The SEEKING system is the opposite of the GRIEF system. “Although attachment is of prime importance in leading a good life, independent achievement is also necessary for fulfillment and happiness.” Bevin gives two case examples in which she acted as a coach who mobilized the SEEKING system “as an agent of cure.” Effective coaches provide “direct communication about a player’s weaknesses, encouragement to improve, and setting a personal example.”

Colin was an adolescent who had lost much of his motivation. His depression primarily resulted from the arousal of GRIEF, as his father did not care about him. Colin was afraid to put himself out there in different ways (e.g., with girls) in order to avoid “the GRIEF of rejection and failure.” His SEEKING system was functional but “compromised because he was unwilling to take any risks that might lead to rejection and failure. Because rejection and failure were so painful, he FEARed them and avoided all challenges.” His LUST system was activated but he self-sabotaged. “He self-directed the CARE system when he soothed himself with a defensively high self-regard. His passive-aggression involved RAGE when he reproached people who failed to appreciate him.” His PLAY system was activated; when Bevin would ask him why he didn’t do something he had previously said he would, “a sly smile would creep across his face.”

Bevin acted like a coach by telling him he was naive for expecting a friend to fulfill a promise that he should have known he wouldn’t fulfill; she then advised him to apologize to the friend. Later in the session, he said that his father didn’t care about him. Bevin said she knew that. “It was bad luck. The trouble was that he made his luck worse by punishing other people as if they, too, let him down. It was time for him to man up and start standing on his own two feet.” The following session he said that he felt happy when she told him to man up. “He never thought of himself as a man, but obviously, I did.” He started to change. “He stood up straight, his facial expression was resolute, and he abandoned his passive-aggressive complaining ways.” Bevin also set an example for Colin; when he had at one point called himself a “fuckwit,” “she joked that she had never been a fuckwit, elicit a smile from h im.

Mitchell was a nine-year-old client who had several fears; he was afraid to play sports, afraid to go to recess, and increasingly afraid to go to school. Bevin learned from his parents that when he was 4 he had been hospitalized for an infection caused by urine being trapped in his foreskin and had consequently been circumcized. After this, his mother reported that “he became reserved and was never again the outgoing boy that he had been.”

Mitchell said he understand that his fears were irrational or “stupid.” “I said that I did not think he was stupid. Nobody is scared without reason, and nobody wants to be scared. If he is frightened, then something must have frightened him. A scary experience can sometimes leave you in a bad way and fear spreads so that you become afraid of almost anything. I related a true story about a colleague at work whose handbag was snatched by a mugger who raced by on a bicycle and knocked her down. She was not hurt, but she was badly shaken, and for several weeks, she was easily startled, and she could not watch her favorite crime drama on TV. She also worried when she walked down the street, even though she knew that she would probably never get mugged again.

“He seemed to be suffering from the same kind of worry. Something bad happened, and now he is frightened by many things. The lady at work was an adult when she was mugged, so she could remember it, and she knew why she was so fearful. His bad experience seems to have happened when he was very young and endured the hospital appointments. Maybe he cannot remember them, but they must have frightened him very badly.”

Mitchell was worried about someone at school opening his lunchbox and putting anthrax on his food, so Bevin suggested that he get a lunch for his lunchbox and wear the key around his neck. She then told him a story from her childhood. “I attended a swimming class, and the teacher wanted us to learn how to dive. The first step was to kneel by the side of the pool and fall headfirst into the water. Hard as I tried, I could not bring myself to take the plunge, and finally, the teacher put her foot on my bottom and pushed me in. I was shocked and incensed, but once I hit the water, I was not frightened at all. It felt weird and entirely different from any other experience. I was not sure if I liked it, but I wanted to try it again. By the end of the summer, I was diving off quite a high board, and I loved it.”

She concluded that the hospital experience had been frightening and that over this years his FEAR system had become sensitized. “The sense of chaos must have resulted from the cognitive dissonance that he endured. As a little boy, he believed in the rules of conduct that his parents had prescribed. Then he had hospital appointments where adults behaved in ways that contravened everything he had ever been taught about decent behavior.”

“Like a coach, I identified fear as the weak area that needed to improve. His willingness to keep the key to his lunchbox was a good sign because it indicated that his SEEKING system was functional and that he felt capable of looking after himself. I encouraged the use of the SEEKING system in combatting his fears and advised him to take small risks.” “I also encouraged his PLAY system by telling him that the thing that I had feared eventually became a source of fun.”