Skip to content
Show Menu

Preclinical Modeling of Primal Emotional Affects (SEEKING, PANIC and PLAY): Gateways to the Development of New Treatments for Depression

Mammalian brains contain at least 7 primal emotional sys- tems – SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC and PLAY (capitalization reflects a proposed primary-process terminol- ogy, to minimize semantic confusions and mereological falla- cies). These systems help organisms feel affectively balanced (e.g. euthymic) and unbalanced (e.g. depressive, irritable, manic), providing novel insights for understanding human psychopathologies. Three systems are especially important for understanding depression: The separation distress (PAN- IC) system mediates the psychic pain of separation distress (i.e. excessive sadness and grief), which can be counteracted by minimizing PANIC arousals (as with low-dose opioids). De- pressive dysphoria also arises from reduced brain reward- seeking and related play urges (namely diminished enthusi- asm (SEEKING) and joyful exuberance (PLAY) which promote sustained amotivational states). We describe how an under- standing of these fundamental emotional circuits can pro- mote the development of novel antidepressive therapeutics – (i) low-dose buprenorphine to counteract depression and suicidal ideation emanating from too much psychic pain (PANIC overarousal), (ii) direct stimulation of the SEEKING sys- tem to counteract amotivational dysphoria, and (iii) the dis- covery and initial clinical testing of social-joy-promoting mol- ecules derived from the analysis of the PLAY system.

Privacy Overview
PEDAL

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer generated when you visit a website and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These essential cookies do things like: remembering the notifications you've seen so we do not show them to you again or your progress through a form. They always need to be on.

3rd Party Cookies

We use a set of third party tools to provide information of how our users engage with our website so that we can improve the experience of the website for our users. For example, we collect information about which of our pages are most frequently visited, and by which types of users. We also use third-party cookies to help with performance.