Topic summary
Homeostatic feeling
Homeostatic feeling is a class of feelings (e.g. thirst, fatigue, pain, desire, malaise, well-being) that inform us about our physiological condition.
Affective neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp, identified homeostatic feeling as one of three primary classes of affect:
- homeostatic affect: e.g., thirst, fatigue
- sensory affect: e.g., touch, warmth
- emotional affect: e.g., anger, fear.
Some homeostatic feelings have a positive or negative valence and motivate specific behavior aimed at maintaining the body in its ideal state. For example, hunger motivates eating, fatigue motivates resting, and feeling hot motivates stepping into the shade.
Pain is a motivating homeostatic feeling; we respond to it by withdrawing from a harmful situation, protecting a damaged body part while it heals, and avoiding similar experiences in the future.
Neuroscientist Derek Denton called these motivating homeostatic feelings "primordial emotions" and defined them as "the subjective element of the instincts, which are the genetically programmed behaviour patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain, hunger for specific minerals etc. There are two constituents of a primordial emotion—the specific sensation which when severe may be imperious, and the compelling intention for gratification by a consummatory act."
Neuroanatomist Arthur Craig called these motivating homeostatic feelings "homeostatic emotions" and found that anthropoid primates (humans, apes and monkeys) form an image of all of the body's unique homeostatic sensations in the brain's primary interoceptive cortex (located in the dorsal posterior insula). This image is re-represented in the mid- and anterior insula, and the anterior insula (modified by input from cognitive, affective and reward-related circuits) plays a role in conscious awareness of the whole body's homeostatic state. A sensation re-represented in the anterior insula and that sensation's related motivation (involving neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and other regions) form a homeostatic emotion.