Affective Emotions

Jaak Pankseep, an Affective Neuroscientist, has provided for us a great model for looking at and understanding emotions in all beings with a brain and nervous system. I'll go into each system individually, but there are some things we should consider about the whole, before we look at the individuals. Because the truth is, we are never experiencing just 1 emotion.

Each emotional/affective system is triggered by the internal or external environment and is expressed through a certain combinations of hormones, neurotransmitters, that tell us how this makes us feel. So natural hormone cycles can change our feelings internally, or external aspects of our environment can elicit different emotional responses. Common examples are oxytocin with the CARE system, Adrenaline with FEAR, etc... different combinations can be widely varied, like mixing paint, a drop of this, a splash of that, you get different colors. Lots of one emotion may overshadow or overwhelm the others, while low level mixes of many colors balance out into more neutral tones.

So each emotional systen has both levels and blended combinations. Some contrast and neutralize, some polarize, some compliment and amplify... these hormonal levels can be fast to elicit, a split second in some cases, and can be slow to disperse.

Each variation comes paired with behaviors, some are reflexive responses to the emotion, triggered directly by the hormone. Like sweating, blushing, breathing faster, startling, flinching, etc... while other behaviors are operant, under the control of the learner, but learned through experience. If they were fearful and running relieved the fear, running will become stronger. If snuggling close created comforting feelings, they will do that more. And so on.

Each emotion is felt as either aversive (something to avoid) or appetitive (something to seek out) and some can flip both ways depending on the context. With that understanding, we realize how these emotions become an impactful part of our training and our relationship. Why do we want to avoid the use of aversives in training? They are paired with unhappy emotions, hormones and reflexes we don't want as part of our relatioship