According to a theory formulated a few decades ago by Jaak Panksepp, emeritus professor of psychology at Bowling Green University (USA) and an expert in affective neuroscience, the seven basic emotions are search, fear, anger, care or protection, pain, desire and play . These emotions, the researcher assures, do not emerge from the cerebral cortex, responsible for complex thinking, but from more primitive structures, including the amygdala and the hypothalamus.
Hence, in rats and many other animals the same emotional states are also present.
