The Emotional Foundations of Personality. A Neurobiological and Evolutionary Approach

Preface and Acknowledgements
Foreword by Mark Solms
Introduction. Personality and Basic Human Motivation: Primer Movers
1. The Mystery of Human Personality
2. Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales and the Big Five
3. Darwin's Comparative "Personality" Model
4. William McDougall's Comparative Psychology: Toward a Naturalistic Personality Approach
5. A Brief Review of Personality Since McDougall: The Need for a Bottom-Up Model of Personality
6. Bottom-Up and Top-Down Personality Approaches
7. Our Ancestral Roots: Personality Research on Great Apes
8. The Special Case of Our Canine Companions
9. Do Rats Have Personalities? Of Course They Do!
10. Animal Personality Summary
11. Preludes to the Big Five Personality Model: Different Paths Toward Understanding BrainMind States That Constitute Human Temperaments
12. The Big Five: The Essential Core of Cattell's Factor Anlaysis
13. The Clarities and Confusions of the Big Five
14. The Earlier History of Biological Theories of Personality: Hans Eysenck, Jeffrey Grey, and Robert Cloninger
15. Genetics and the Origins of Personality
16. Human Brain Imaging
17. Personality and the Self
18. Affective Neuro-Personality and Psychopathology
19. Fleshing Out the Complexities
Appendix: The Affective Neuroscience
Personality Scales
References
Index

This book presents the wealth of scientific evidence that our personality emerges from evolved primary emotions shared by all mammals. Yes, your dog feels love—and many other things too. These subcortically generated emotions bias our actions, alter our perceptions, guide our learning, provide the basis for our thoughts and memories, and become regulated over the course of our lives.

Understanding personality development from the perspective of mammals is a groundbreaking approach, and one that sheds new light on the ways in which we as humans respond to life events, both good and bad.

Jaak Panksepp, famous for discovering laughter in rats and for creating the field of affective neuroscience, died in April 2017. This book forms part of his lasting legacy and impact on a wide range of scientific and humanistic disciplines. It will be essential reading for anyone trying to understand how we act in the world, and the world’s impact on us.