Editors' Introduction

The TARGET ARTICLE, written by Jason Wright and Jaak Panksepp, in this issue of the Journal is an important one for affective neuroscience. It deals with a concept central to Panksepp's theoretical structure for understanding the evolution and functioning of affect systems, focusing on the SEEKING system, a primary-process affect that enlivens mammals, as well as many other vertebrate species. For those not yet immersed in Panksepp's affect theory, the article will be a wonderful introduction to this important model. For those who are familiar with the thinking, it will provide a cutting-edge view of the progress of this intellectual and scientific set of ideas. The model was set forth in great detail in his 1998 book, Affective Neuroscience, now a major classic in this field. It is a model that has attempted to overcome some deficiencies in behaviorist theories of affect and to provide a comprehensive hierarchical system that fits the phenomena at all biological levels. The construct itself is not easy to understand, partly because in order to cover its territory it has taken on some neologistic artifacts that break sharply from previous affective theories.

One convention is the hierarchical model of primary, secondary, and tertiary processes. Psychoanalysts should be aware that here primary process is not a descriptor of a form of cognitive process, but is primary in the sense of foundational in biology. In previous work, Panksepp has evolved his system so that the primary processes are a set of affects evolved in early organisms, essentially prior to learning mechanisms. He designates these primary affects by capitalization, currently listing them as SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. He refers to them as “emotional action systems,” and one can see that each of them has an action implication or component. Animal learning, by association of these primal affects with environmental phenomena (the content of the behavioral paradigm of oper