ABSTRACT
The seven core emotional systems are: care, grief, play, lust, seeking, fear, and rage. These core emotions make sense from the evolutionary perspective — each has tremendous adaptive significance. Four of them are pleasant (care, play, lust, seeking) and experiencing them is beneficial to the animal’s health and welfare — these emotional states are reinforcing, and animals are generally willing to work to experience them. The other three are unpleasant (grief, fear, rage), and animals will generally work to avoid them. While Panksepp’s core emotion model allowed identification of brain areas and behaviors associated with basic emotions, it did not provide a clear explanation for arousal. In such a case, combining the Panksepp core emotion and the core affect space models can facilitate understanding and interpretation of animal behaviors and emotions. In turn, grief, fear, and rage are all negative/aversive, and experiencing these emotions would place an animal to the left in core affect space matrix.
