Toward a cross‐species neuroscientific understanding of the affective mind: do animals have emotional feelings?

Abstract

Do we need to consider mental processes in our analysis of brain functions in other animals? Obviously we do, if such BrainMind functions exist in the animals we wish to understand. If so, how do we proceed, while still retaining materialistic-mechanistic perspectives? This essay outlines the historical forces that led to emotional feelings in animals being marginalized in behavioristic scientific discussions of why animals behave the way they do, and why mental constructs are generally disregarded in modern neuroscientific analyses. The roots of this problem go back to Cartesian dualism and the attempt of 19th century physician-scientists to ground a new type of medical curriculum on a completely materialistic approach to body functions. Thereby all vitalistic principles were discarded from the lexicon of science, and subjective experience in animals was put in that category and discarded as an invalid approach to animal behavior. This led to forms of rigid operationalism during the era of behaviorism and subsequently ruthless reductionism in brain research, leaving little room for mentalistic concepts such as emotional feelings in animal research. However, modern studies of the brain clearly indicate that artificially induced arousals of emotional networks, as with localized electrical and chemical brain stimulation, can serve as "rewards" and "punishments" in various learning tasks. This strongly indicates that animal brains elaborate various experienced states, with those having affective contents being easiest to study rigorously. However, in approaching emotional feelings empirically we must pay special attention to the difficulties and vagaries of human language and evolutionary levels of control in the brain. We need distinct nomenclatures from primary (unconditioned phenomenal experiences) to tertiary (reflective) levels of mind. The scientific pursuit of affective brain processes in other mammals can now reveal general BrainMind principles that also apply to human feelings, as with neurochemical predictions from preclinical animal models to self-reports of corresponding human experiences. In short, brain research has now repeatedly verified the existence of affective experience-various reward and punishment functions-during artificial arousal of emotional networks in our fellow animals. The implications for new conceptual schema for understanding human/primate affective feelings and how such knowledge can impact scientific advances in biological psychiatry are also addressed.

Group hunting within the Carnivora: physiological, cognitive and environmental influences on strategy and cooperation

“…Working memory capacity and long-term learning and memory, for example, are important for learning associations between particular behavioural strategies and hunting situations (Packer and Pusey 1997;McMorris et al 2010). In addition, animals' decisions can be strongly influenced by emotion, as can other cognitive processes such as learning and memory (de Waal 2011;Panksepp 2011). Evidence suggests that animals' ability to show restraint when excited may contribute to the success of cooperation.…”

Alcohol enhances unprovoked 22–28kHz USVs and suppresses USV mean frequency in High Alcohol Drinking (HAD-1) male rats

“…Rodents emit USVs in the 50–55 kHz and 22–28 kHz ranges, which are reliably associated with positive and negative emotional states, respectively [15–17]. USVs have received increased attention in drug abuse studies because administration of cocaine [18], amphetamine [19] and drug-associated cues [20, 21] increase 50–55 kHz frequency-modulated (FM) USV emissions.…”

Alcohol‐Preferring P Rats Emit Spontaneous 22‐28 kHz Ultrasonic Vocalizations that are Altered by Acute and Chronic Alcohol Experience

“…Selectively bred alcohol-preferring P rats display a behavioral phenotype akin to the diagnostic criteria for AUDs and thus provide an excellent model of alcoholism (Bell et al, 2006, Bell et al., 2011, Bell et al, 2012, Bell et al, 2014). Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) emitted by rodents are social signals revealing affective states and are typically categorized into two main types: 50–55 kHz frequency-modulated (FM; positive-affect related) and 22–28 kHz (negative-affect related) USVs (Burgdorf et al, 2008, Burgdorf et al, 2011, Panksepp, 2011). Ascending mesolimbic cholinergic (Brudzynski, 1994) and dopaminergic pathways (Burgdorf et al, 2007) mediate 22–28 and 50–55 kHz USV emissions, respectively, and are hypothesized to concurrently initiate positive and negative emotional states (Bihari et al, 2003, Brudzynski, 2009, Brudzynski, 2013).…”