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Introduction
Published in Alice Bullard, Spiritual and Mental Health Crisis in Globalizing Senegal, 2022
Affective neuroscience is the lens through which this book takes historical perspective on the case studies from Fann Hospital (Porges 2011, 2017). The case studies reveal a magico-spiritualist consciousness broadly comparable across cultures to folkloric tales of fairies, magic, and witches. The human species shares this propensity to narrativize mysterious, visceral, hopes and fears, and to solidify such narratives into belief systems. Affective neuroscience teaches us to place this narrativizing of the visceral, and consequent metaphysical belief systems, within the perspective of evolved higher consciousness that remains intimately dependent upon ancient reptilian autonomic nerves and lower brain structures. On a planet that is five billion years old, our species is young and seemingly unprecedented, both in its intelligence and its destructive capacities. Despite the power of humanity’s cerebral intellect, visceral forces of unreason continually re-emerge in each individual as well as in human collectives. Culture, history, and life experiences can mold physiology, but the powerful autonomic neural system reasserts itself nonetheless time and again.
Joseph LeDoux (b. 1949)
Published in Andrew P. Wickens, Key Thinkers in Neuroscience, 2018
LeDoux left Cornell in 1989, moving to New York University where he has remained since, rising through professorships, to take the position of university professor – the highest honour for a faculty member at NYU. He now heads the Emotional Brain Institute, founded in 2007, as well as directing the university’s Centre for the Neuro science of Fear and Anxiety. With over 30 years of research into emotion, and author of popular books including The Emotional Brain, LeDoux has long been at the forefront of bringing the subject of emotion in from the cold. Indeed, by trying to understand emotion in terms of information processing rather than a phenom enological experience, LeDoux has helped establish the field of affective neuroscience. He has also done more than any other investigator to make the amygdala a household word. In addition, LeDoux is the only neuroscientist in this book who is a lead singer and guitarist of a rock band (called “The Amygdaloids”). And his song writing is clearly influenced by his work. On the first track of his band’s album, Heavy Mental, LeDoux sings “Why do we feel so afraid? Don’t have to look very far. It’s all in a nut—in your brain”.
Scepticism of the gentle variety: interview with Derek Bolton, PhD
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2021
Bolton: This is a very good question and a very good example. The ICD and DSM are right to say nothing gets in unless it is a reasonably well-defined and replicable syndrome. Some proposed candidates never cross this scientific-clinical first test. After that I believe that issues will include considerations of distress and impairments associated with the condition and relative harms and benefits of inclusion/exclusion as a mental disorder as viewed by various stakeholders. I don’t think the science plays much at just this stage, though of course it does, among other things, in more precise specification of syndrome and place in the overall classification. That said, I have recently come to appreciate (somewhat late in the day) that the rapidly accelerating neuroscience especially what is sometimes called cognitive affective neuroscience and its utilisation of functional neuronal imaging effectively blurs neuroscience with psychology – as neurologist thinkers such as Freud anticipated. But further, as it becomes advanced, it can provide an epistemological angle on mental functioning. This is additional to inferring mental states from behaviour and self-reports. To the extent that neuropsychological mechanisms underlying addiction are well understood in paradigm cases of chemical compound addiction, the question arises whether the same mechanisms are involved in other cases of putative addiction.
Shame: An Acute Stress Response to Interpersonal Traumatization
Published in Psychiatry, 2020
Panksepp (1998) stresses that while affective neuroscience research can teach us about the experience of anger, it cannot illumine the cultural, environmental, and cognitive causes of aggression. In the embryonic stages of this work, the developmentalists continue to emphasize the critical role of impoverished attachment. Constantino (1995), in reviewing a study of a sample of hospitalized, highly aggressive boys, concluded: “The more inadequate or unimportant a child perceives him-or herself, the more malicious the other, the less the empathic connection, and the poorer the ability to interpret or process affective signals, the higher the child’s propensity for aggression will be” (p. 267). Perry (1995) as well speculated about the effects of emotional neglect in childhood: They “predispose to violence by decreasing the strength of the subcortical and cortical impulse-modulating capacity and by decreasing the value of other humans due to an incapacity to empathize or sympathize with them. This decreased value of humans means that there is a much lower threshold for the unattached person to act in an antisocial fashion to gratify their impulses” (p. 6).
Relations Between Lexical and Biological Perspectives on Personality: New Evidence Based on HEXACO and Affective Neuroscience Theory
Published in Journal of Personality Assessment, 2020
Goran Knežević, Ljiljana B. Lazarević, Christian Montag, Ken Davis
This overlap is less intense in the case of phenomena related to O, and minimal in the case of those connected to H, C, and Spirituality. The absence of the notable relations between affective neuroscience emotional systems on one hand and C and H, on the other hand, is expected. Entailing top-down behavioral inhibition in the case of C and a higher order sense of fairness in the case of H, they do not have a counterpart among the primary emotional systems (Davis & Panksepp, 2011).