This interdisciplinary project is located at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychoanalysis and personality psychology. The project aims to combine behavioral and neurophysiological methods in healthy human individuals in order to validate specific aspects of Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience Theory (ANT; Panksepp (2004)). According to ANT, there are seven primary emotional systems deeply embedded within the mammalian brain which undergird psychological wellbeing and affective brain disorders (Montag & Davis, 2018; Panksepp, 2006). The emotional systems are ANGER, FEAR, SADNESS (negative systems), SEEKING, LUST, CARE, and PLAY (positive systems). A self-report questionnaire, the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS) was developed to integrate the ability of humans to report their emotional experiences related to these basic emotional responses and to assess individual variability in each of the emotional systems (Davis & Panksepp, 2011).
Here, we aim to investigate the association of inter-individual variability in two of these emotional systems (SADNESS, SEEKING), as measured by the ANPS, with variability in the processing of emotionally and motivationally relevant stimuli in the brain. For this, in a large sample of individuals, electroencephalography will be measured during the performance of a cognitive task involving emotional and motivational manipulations (Mueller et al., 2021). We intend to differentiate the time course of emotion-motivation interactions by considering task preparatory processes, attentional allocation during stimulus processing and the processing of performance feedback.
In a second step, functional magnetic resonance imaging will be applied in extreme groups with respect to SADNESS and SEEKING to specify the neural locus of individual variability in emotional and motivational responses in relation to subjective reports in more detail.
With this, we aim to contribute to the understanding of individual variability in primary emotional and motivational responses as a basis of personality and variations thereof.
Original language: German and English
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