The Emotional Onion: Peeling Back the Layers of Feeling

Did you ever wish your emotions would just shut up and leave you the duck alone? Well, they won’t. They can’t. Emotions are millions of your tinny personal thermostats, taking in sensory inputs, checking them against your goals, and nudging you toward actions; whether you like it or not. They manifest as feelings constantly calibrating your responses to the world. The feeling you experience corresponds with the activation of neural and hormonal networks on the organic side. These are inseparable faces of the same coin. Experientially, emotions can feel like a mixed bag. Sometimes, they’re a clearly articulated sonnet. Other times, they’re a vague murmur in a language you barely recognize. Your ability to accurately describe what you’re feeling depends heavily on your and others’ emotional dictionary. When you tell someone about your emotions, you’re engaging in a kind of interpersonal charade, assuming that describing your last date as “weird” means “quirky and wonderful” and not “plotting their next true-crime episode”. Did you ever thing of it? You can only introspect your own emotions. You can’t borrow someone else’s neurohormonal system and compare the feeling. As everyone else, you are stuck in your emotional “echo chambers”, piecing together the words, meanings and feeling as best you can.

Why We Need Emotional Theories (and Why None of Them Feel Quite Right)

Because emotions are private experiences, they’ve puzzled thinkers for centuries. To make sense of them, we’ve cooked up countless theories. It’s like trying to reverse-engineer Wi-Fi by watching cats walk under routers. The James-Lange theory claims your body’s reaction kicks off the emotion. Your heart races, then you feel the creeping awkwardness of having pressed “Reply All” on that email. The Cannon-Bard theory argues that emotions and body responses happen simultaneously. Imagine pressing “Reply All” and feeling your face flush with panic even as the emotional regret bubbles up at the same time. Finally, the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory insists you need both a physiological reaction and a cognitive label to get the full emotional experience. In this case, your heart races as you realize what you’ve done, and you think, “This is bad, and now I feel mortified.” You’re trying to figure out the distinction? James-Lange: body first, then feeling. Cannon-Bard: body and feeling happen together. Schachter-Singer: body + cognition = feeling. Why does this matter? Honestly, I have no idea. But it’s in every textbook, so here we are. 

What you will likely figure out does matter are the categorizations of emotions. In 1890, William James proposed four basic emotions: fear, sadness, love, and anger. He saw these as the foundational ingredients that combine into more complex feelings. A century later Paul Ekman expanded this list to six: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Ekman’s research focuses on facial expressions across cultures. His studies show that no matter where you go humans recognize these emotions in the same way. They are obviously preloaded. Jaak Panksepp took things further, swapping facial expressions for brain circuits. He hatched the idea of stimulating different parts of rats' brains with electrodes and observing their reactions. Their laughs, explorations, and sudden freezes offered clues to the emotional networks in their brains. Panksepp identified seven core emotional systems: seeking, fear, separation distress, anger, care, play, and lust. These systems aren’t just found in rats of course; they’re hardwired into all mammals. So, including you … if you are human. The same emotional hardware has been running the operating system of species for millions of years.

At its core, categorizing emotions breaks down your emotional experiences into manageable building blocks, making it easier to understand their functioning principles and how to optimize them. Basic emotions are theoretical concepts that provide a foundation for working on your emotional fitness. It’s a bit like organizing a chaotic closet; once you group everything into categories, the chaos starts to make sense.

The Three Levels of Emotional Processing: From Instincts to Self-Reflection

With the horizontal basics covered, let’s move to the vertical dimension of your emotional blueprint. You may’ve heard that in neuroscience we have this kooky habit of slicing the brain into three levels. (1) The foundational layer securing basic life functions; (2) the middle layer upgrading the basic operating system by your environment; (3) the highest layer refining your beautiful being with reflection, self-awareness and self-direction. Basic emotions are a part of the hardwired foundational layer. In Pankseppian affectology, we label them as core emotions. The middle layer is where your secondary emotional circuitry develops guided by your personal experiences by interacting with your environment. At the third level tertiary emotions annotate your mental and behavior functioning with self-awareness and self-direction. Understanding these three layers—the survival foundation, the learned patterns, and the reflective refinements—offers a framework for exploring how emotions function and how they can be optimized. Each layer builds upon the last, creating a dynamic system that influences every aspect of your life.

• Core Emotional Networks (Red Zone): These are primary emotions, the unchanging basic survival system of the brain. Core emotions like fear, rage, and joy operate on autopilot, ensuring survival.
• Secondary Emotional Networks (Green Zone): These networks form through early experiences and shape emotional patterns that are adaptive for your relational environment. It’s like learning which keys unlock which doors in the emotional escape room of life.
• Tertiary Emotional Networks (Yellow Zone): The most sophisticated level, where rationality, language, and self-awareness come into play. Here, your primary and secondary systems interface with your sense of self.

Your Primal Survival Kit: The Core Emotions

The primary level of emotional processing happens in your brainstem; the central hub managing essential survival functions. You are born with this system and it’s the primal HQ that keeps you alive. It keeps your heart beating, compels you to eat and drink, and warns you to steer clear of dark alleys. Primary emotions are a fundamental part of this built-in survival kit. Just as hunger signals you to eat or pain prompts you to seek relief, core emotions nudge you toward survival behaviors without conscious thought. You don’t need a masterclass to know when and how to feel anger or joy. They come pre-installed and ready to run. Neuroscience has identified distinct neural networks associated with these emotions, and they are strikingly universal across individuals and cultures. However, in adult humans, core emotions can’t operate in isolation. They’re deeply intertwined with secondary and tertiary emotional processes, making every emotional experience a mix of these layers. That said, the primary level is theoretically and empirically the most manageable. Its neural activations are relatively well-defined, and specific networks correlate with characteristic behaviors. Let’s meet the crew:

• SEEKING drives you to explore, search, and pursue goals; from finding food to scrolling the internet for answers at 2 a.m.
• RAGE propels you to defend your boundaries, take action, or claim what’s yours; sometimes by arguing, sometimes by mentally rehearsing your Oscar-worthy "comeback speech" in the shower.
• FEAR activates avoidance and self-protection; leading you to dodge, hide, or take cautious steps when danger looms.
• PANIC/GRIEF prompts you to maintain connection and resist loss. If the attempt fails, it leads to withdrawal as a way to rethink and recover.
• PLAY encourages experimentation and light-hearted interaction; testing your strength, skills, and limits in safe, non-serious contexts, like humor, games, sports, and the arts.
• CARE fosters nurturing and caregiving behaviors; whether you’re soothing a crying child or sending your friend a comforting meme.
• LUST fuels sexual interest and desire; the ancient impulse to ensure the species survives, but also the motivation to make yourself desirable, whether by climbing the social ladder or getting your nails done.

Were you a lampreys or hagfish, this post might have ended here. But you are an amniote with a fancy neurohormonal system and all that magnificent emotional pandemonium. So, we must grind further.

Secondary and Tertiary Emotional Networks: Why Your Emotional Experience is Uniquely Yours

Secondary emotional networks energe as personalized extensions of your primary emotions. Unlike the universal, hardwired nature of core emotions, secondary emotions are shaped by your early experiences, which build emotional patterns shaped by your social and relational environment. During childhood, you begin internalizing social and relational dynamics and a mental map of safe and unsafe objects (meaning, people) and patterns of behavior. Through associations with pleasant emotions, you learn what is encouraged and what should be avoided by association with unpleasant emotions. These learned models form the emotional manual for navigating your living landscape and getting you where you want to get. While the core emotion of fear might prevent you getting eaten, the secondary emotion of fear helps you not angering your wife by remembering your mother’s legendary wrath after stepping on her freshly mopped floors. Your secondary patterns are brought up by your childhood significant others, for better or worse. If you grew up in a dysfunctional environment, your secondary emotional network may not always serve your best interests. Recognizing and reshaping these learned emotional patterns is the first stop on your emotional fitness journey.

As your brain matures and gains rational abilities, primary and secondary systems interface with awareness and self-regulation, forming a tertiary layer. The tertiary layer allows for mindfulness, reflection, and deliberate decision-making. It’s the part of your brain that lets you step back from a heated argument and think, “Is this worth it?” or to feel sadness but resist spiraling into despair by reframing your perspective. While primary and secondary emotions are automatic, tertiary emotions involve a interplay between reason and emotion. This allows you to reinterpret experiences, consider consequences, and rewrite your emotional scripts. You may feel anger bubbling up during a disagreement but, through self-awareness, recognize it as stemming from an old fear of being dismissed, choosing instead to assert yourself calmly. The tertiary layer is where you shape your identity. Are you the kind of person who reacts impulsively, or do you pride yourself on staying composed under pressure? Do you view sadness as weakness or as a sign of depth and connection? These are decisions, influenced by your values and beliefs. The tertiary layer allows for the greatest emotional freedom.

Every emotional experience you have pulls from all three layers. Because of this complexity, emotions at the secondary and tertiary levels defy simple categorization. Your emotional architecture is as unique as your fingerprint; formed by your personal history, shaped by relationships, and molded by lessons about safety, danger, desires, and taboos. No one else feels anger, sadness, or joy quite the way you do because no one else has lived your life. Your emotional fingerprint is shaped by countless factors: the lullabies you heard as a baby, the heartbreaks you endured as a teenager, the lessons you’ve learned from successes and failures. It’s a constantly evolving mosaic, pieced together from the fragments of your history, relationships, and aspirations. Grasping your emotions at the tertiary level therefore is like herding cats. Each one jumping in a different direction, often at the most inconvenient moment. Working directly on these higher-level emotions is incredibly challenging because of their sheer complexity and individuality. That’s where primary emotion models come in. By categorizing and understanding emotions at their core level, those universal building blocks, we created frameworks that simplify this chaos. These models act like a net, helping you gather and manage bunches of cats at once, making the pandemonium of real-life emotions more approachable and workable.

Closing Thought: Knowing Your Emotional Blueprint

Just like math starts with understanding numbers and reading begins with letters, mastering your emotions requires learning their foundational components. Without a grasp of the basics, you actually have no idea what you are doing. Attempts to manage your emotional patterns can feel frustrating and be aimless. It’s not your fault you’ve struggled. From the most popular approaches to optimizing or managing motional challenges it is obvious that affectology is a young science in its infancy. Most popular approaches to managing emotional challenges reflect how young the contemporary science of emotion still is. General advice is everywhere, but it often lacks a solid foundation or clear context for when and how to apply it. Emotional optimization is highly contextual and the same approach has opposite effects in different circumstances, with different individuals and for different emotions. Approaching it from the tertiary layer, where you encounter a chaos of everything, is an overwhelming task. It’s like trying to learn math by starting with calculus or playing your first tennis match against Federer. By understanding the basics, you know what you are working with instead of relying on random trial and error. Working with a clear framework is a much more reliable approach to build emotional fitness.