The future of the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales: A reflection on seven pressing matters

Christian Montag; Mark Solms; Christine Stelzel; Kenneth L Davis

doi:10.1017/pen.2022.2

The future of the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales: A reflection on seven pressing matters

Personal Neurosci. 2022 Sep 20:5:e10. doi: 10.1017/pen.2022.2. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Christian Montag¹, Mark Solms², Christine Stelzel³, Kenneth L Davis⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Molecular Psychology, Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany.
² Neuroscience Institute and Psychology Department, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Western Cape 7701, South Africa.
³ General Psychology and Neurocognitive Psychology, International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
⁴ Pegasus International, Greensboro, NC, 27408, USA.

Abstract

The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS) were designed to provide researchers in the mental sciences with an inventory to assess primary emotional systems according to Pankseppian Affective Neuroscience Theory (ANT). The original ANPS, providing researchers with such a tool, was published in 2003. In the present brief communication, about 20 years later, we reflect upon some pressing matters regarding the further development of the ANPS. We touch upon problems related to disentangling traits and states of the primary emotional systems with the currently available versions of the ANPS and upon its psychometric properties and its length. We reflect also on problems such as the large overlap between the SADNESS and FEAR dimensions, the disentangling of PANIC and GRIEF in the context of SADNESS, and the absence of a LUST scale. Lastly, we want to encourage scientists with the present brief communication to engage in further biological validation of the ANPS.

Keywords: ANPS; Panksepp; Trait-state debate.