"Mad Scientist" or "Poet"?

Have you ever reacted impulsively, especially out of anger or frustration?  

I certainly have - and odds are you have, too.  

We wouldn’t be human if at some point we didn’t take a breath, pause for thirty seconds, sleep on it, drink some water, or “cool down” before we reacted to whatever negative force we experienced.  

Interestingly, the reaction we feel in those moments can be explained by Jaak Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience framework, where “Affect” stands for “Feeling” or “Emotion”.
 
Specifically, Panksepp coins the seven primary emotional systems: Seeking, Rage, Fear, Lust, Care, Panic, and Play.
 
For instance, when we’re angry, our Rage pathway engages. When we’re trying to solve a problem and find resolution, our Seeking pathway engages.  

This is why we can’t “think straight” when we’re upset and that waiting before you respond (however that looks like) is often the best strategy to let your Affect switch from Rage to Seeking.
 
Taking his work a step further, Panksepp created the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale (ANPS), motivated to better understand depression, bi-polar disorder, and other mental conditions,
 
The nearly 1700+ studies, in conclusion, found that each mental condition correlated to various patterns of the seven primary emotional systems - advancing our understanding of and how to treat people who are experiencing mental health challenges.
 
Depression, for example, as Panksepp shares in a TedTalk, is often associated with less engagement of the Seeking pathway.  

Similarly, as we examine happiness and unhappiness, scientists, scholars, and philosophers have traditionally posited that happiness and unhappiness, like Rage and Seeking, are also mutually exclusive - that unhappiness is the absence of happiness and happiness is the absence of unhappiness.  

However, Arthur C. Brooks, another renown neuroscientist, and Oprah Winfrey, renown humanitarian, argue in their co-authored book “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier” that happiness and unhappiness are not necessarily mutually exclusive - that you exhibit both happiness and unhappiness, synchronously.  

Further, happiness and unhappiness are, of course, largely processed in separate hemispheres of the brain, but that everyone, nonetheless, has a different baseline for happiness and unhappiness which then dictates their Affective Systems (emotions), as Panksepp would say. 

So, like the ANPS, Brooks and Winfrey highlight the PANAS (Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule) test (created by psychologists David Watson, Lee Anna Clark, and Auke Tellegen), which helps quantify happiness and unhappiness, or, rather, your baseline of positive and negative emotions. 

Specifically, PANAS will measure your Positive and Negative Affects as percentiles against the general population, and you’ll score one of the four possible combinations of Positive to Negative Affect:  

High:High (Positive Affect:Negative Affect)  

Low:Low 

High:Low 

Low:High  

To simplify the interpretation of PANAS results, Arthur Brooks created the following framework: 

If you scored ‘High:Low’ you’d be described as a “Cheerleader” - someone high on life, but who struggles with giving hard news and is not the best leader.  

If you scored ‘Low:High’ you’d be described as a “Poet” - someone wickedly accurate in their assessments, straightforward, and discriminating.  

If you scored ‘High:High’ you’d be described as a “Mad Scientist” - someone who thinks everything is either euphoric or the world is ending and with bold and emotional opinions.

If you scored ‘Low:Low’ you’d be described as a “Judge” - someone extremely level-headed, often difficult to read and get to open, and who likes to stay under the radar.  

All appear somewhat polarizing.  

Remember, though, the PANAS test gives you a percentile result, and that Brooks’ framework is a guide.

As for me, I scored 90.3% in Positive Affect and 97.1 in Negative Affect - so I definitely lean towards “Mad Scientist”.

But, as Brooks discusses on Rich Roll’s podcast, you are not pigeonholed into being just a “Mad Scientist” or “Judge”; you may fall in-between or be any combination of the four.

Lots of food for thought.

As such, the whole idea behind the PANAS or ANPS test is that you can start to manage yourself through metacognition: to think about why you think (or feel) the way you do and then govern yourself appropriately across all your relationships. 

From family and friends, work direct reports and counterparts, or partners, figuring out who compliments you and why can be incredibly powerful. 

That’s why a “Cheerleader” and “Poet” can help manage each other's negativity and positive biases, or, conversely, that a “Mad Scientist” and another “Mad Scientist” may find that the lows are excessively dramatic and the highs euphoric.

So, at the end of the day, it’ll be up to you to manage and understand how your and others’ emotions tick. The strength of relationships, diversity of ideas, responses to adversity, effective communication, and your success or failure may depend on it. 

While we certainly need to consider mutability in our life circumstances, generally your emotional (Affect) baseline doesn’t waver.  

So, give the PANAS test a go or read up on Panksepp and Arthur C. Brooks to learn how you can best compliment, not exacerbate, your and others’ Positive and Negative Affects and see how metacognition impacts your relationships.