“Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals and Humans”

Panksepp contends that the bedrock of emotional feelings is contained within the evolved emotional action apparatus of mammalian brains. He asserts that primary process affective consciousness seems to be fundamentally an unconditional ‘‘gift of nature’’ rather than an acquired skill, even though those systems facilitate skill acquisition via various felt reinforcements. Affective consciousness, being a comparatively intrinsic function of the brain, shared homologously by all mammalian species, should be the easiest variant of consciousness to study in animals. Through a study of specific brain systems, the neural infrastructure of human and animal affective consciousness may be revealed. Admittedly, the information-processing brain functions, critical for cognitive consciousness, are harder to study in other animals than the more homologous emotional/motivational affective state functions of the brain.