**1. Introduction**

The Coronavirus-19 Pandemic posed a significant global challenge and particularly to Italy, as the first European country impacted by it [1]. This severe universal crisis has disrupted various crucial aspects of life and affected both the physical and psychological health of individuals facing this collective trauma [2]. COVID-19 has been defined as a cultural trauma, which in fact shared many of the characteristics that circumscribe this, including: a fundamental disruption of what is taken for granted in daily life; a potential loss of trust in leaders and social institutions; negative attribution of the media; and a contentious struggle with meaning to determine what happened and who is responsible. People have experienced the pandemic as traumatic, characterized by a loss of existential security, a biopolitical condition that can potentially create new modalities of subjection and subjectivation, shaping both collective and individual subjectivities [3]. Cultural traumas imply anxiety and suffering, but also opportunity. The latter stems from the human capacity to learn and adjust to new conditions; to reevaluate the world, as well as to live in it. COVID-19 was a real threat to human survival and the Italian government adopted isolation and social distancing as its first, and perhaps, most effective response

Monte, C.; Petrovska, E.; Di Trani, M. The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Primary Emotional Systems and Emotional Regulation. *Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health* **2021**, *18*, 5742. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph18115742

**Citation:** Mariani, R.; Renzi, A.; Di

Academic Editors: Lorys Castelli, Paolo Roma, Merylin Monaro and Cristina Mazza

Received: 8 April 2021 Accepted: 24 May 2021 Published: 27 May 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

strategy. These elements have, in turn, severely tested the stamina of individuals and contributed to a notable increase in psychopathology as a reaction to the pandemic [1,4–8].

In this context, it is of particular interest to focus on the emotional parts of personality by referring to Affective Neuroscience Theory [9,10], which is one of the most well-known theories in the emotional sciences. Panksepp was the first to coin the term, "Affective Neuroscience" [11] and posited that human personality refers to stable individual differences in emotionality, motivation, and cognition, resulting in behavioral action patterns. Furthermore, he stated that emotions are the oldest evolutionary parts of human personality which drive human personality traits and behavior. Several researchers have explained [12–14] the role of emotions in relation to personality and how they influence human relationships. Panksepp et al. looked at the brain structures that underpin human emotions using neurobiology, ethology, and evolutionary results. At the heart of human emotional processes are three positive and three negative emotional structures (capitalizations denote advanced scientific jargon) which proposed that six primary emotional systems (PES) have been equivalently conserved across the mammalian brain. These phylogenetically old systems function as tools for survival and endow mammalian species with important brain systems to successfully interact with the environment. According to Panksepp, the primary positive emotions are: SEEKING, CARE, and PLAY; whereas the primary negative ones are: FEAR, SADNESS and ANGER [15,16]. These systems reflect embedded tools for survival which are highly evolutionary; imbalances in these different systems are associated with psychopathological characteristics [17]. For example, higher FEAR/SADNESS, along with lower SEEKING levels, represent the state of depression [18].

Following this notion, emotional regulation is strictly related to the internal primary emotional system (PES) which individuals have built during their own life.

PES influences emotion regulation strategies and structures specific relationship patterns between self and others and between self and the environment. Therefore, each person, throughout the course of their lifetime, tends to establish emotional strategies that balance the basic emotional systems. A traumatic event or a completely new situation will involve a need for each person to readjust their positive and negative systems in order to ensure survival [15]. For instance, the ability to feel the support of others during social distancing is a subjective ability connected to PES [10]. Psychological health is based on the development of harmonious and balanced positive and negative emotional systems. This balance influences higher mental processes and, on the other hand, conflict or imbalance can generate psychological suffering. The pandemic is a real attack on humanity. To protect the population, the Italian government quickly instituted social distancing rules and instituted a lockdown for all the population, except for health workers involved in protecting the health of citizens.

Utilizing the framework of Affective Neuroscience, PES should contribute to the rebalancing of emotional systems in order to adapt to the imposed rules and to survive through the usage of them. Our study emphasizes how people were triggered to generate emotional and behavioral strategies in response to the fear of extinction evoked by the virus and the collective trauma surrounding it. Panksepp coined the term "BrainMind," which intentionally conflates 'brain' and 'mind' to reflect the importance of primary emotion in the influencing of attitudes, traits, and emotional strategies. We hypothesize that emotional BrainMind may detect adaptive strategies as a phylogenetically refined affective function over the course of human evolution. Furthermore, we hypothesize that diversified affective capacities can help reduce the stressful impact or, on the contrary, increase its effects. More specifically, we hypothesize that:

