Table 1.

Primary emotional systems represent in-built tools for survival that are highly conserved across the mammalian brain (taken from Montag & Panksepp, 2017; see [21]).

Primary Emotional System (PES)	Evolutionary Function
SEEKING	The SEEKING system provides mammals with psychological “energy” (i.e., enthusiasm) to explore the environment. This is necessary to find mating partners as well as food to nourish both the brain and body.
LUST	LUST activity is of importance for attraction to the opposite sex and transfer one’s own genome (hence also of species homo sapiens) in terms of offspring.
CARE	Humans are social mammals. In social groups survival chances are higher. Moreover, taking CARE of one’s own offspring helps assure that the young children grow into adults and themselves can have families.
PLAY	PLAY behavior is of importance to learn social competencies and motoric skills. This aids living successfully in complex social groups as an adult.
FEAR	Without a FEAR response (along with the learning it promotes) homo sapiens would not have optimal abilities to escape and avoid dangerous situations and to carefully monitor the safety of their environments.
ANGER	Activity of the ANGER system is observed when mammals are in need of defending themselves (when a predator is closing in), but also in situations of frustration, when an expected reward is absent. ANGER activity is also displayed in the context of resolving territorial conflicts.
SADNESS	PANIC/SADNESS reflects separation distress and signals a situation of having lost contact with an important person or being lost in the environment. As homo sapiens is a social animal, separation from a caregiver or another important person triggers a distress reaction leading to distress vocalization (crying) to reunite with a partner or a parent. Ultimately, as with CARE, homo sapiens is stronger in groups than when alone. CARE activities can also counteract and downregulate SADNESS arousal.