We compared Ed Diener’s Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), which was designed as a purely cognitive measure of global life satisfaction, with the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales 3.1, which provides self-report measures of Panksepp’s six primary emotions (excluding LUST), in two English-speaking samples: a main sample and a hold-out validation sample. Our data showed robust negative correlations between higher satisfaction with life and lower FEAR, lower SADNESS/Separation Distress, and positive associations (albeit less strong) between higher satisfaction with life and higher PLAY and SEEKING in both samples. The relationships between the SWLS and at least four of Panksepp’s primary emotions suggest Diener’s SWLS is not purely cognitive and includes a strong affective component. In addition, detailed analysis of the negative correlation between the SWLS and the ANPS 3.1 SADNESS scale provides insight into the importance of the low arousal end of the SADNESS/Separation Distress brain system and supports the idea of a continuum of psychological states from high SADNESS including loneliness and depression to low SADNESS psychological states characterized by social comfort, self-confidence, and social strength.

This article reviews the seminal work of Jaak Panksepp: Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. It outlines the basis of his theory of Basic Emotional Command Systems as common to all mammals and goes on to specify some of the key fields that have grown out of his research.

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.