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The interactional instinct consists of an appetitive and a consummatory component. The biology underlying consummation develops first and involves the expression of endogenous opiates during child‐caregiver interaction. These opiates provide the child and the adult with feelings of attachment. This process entrains the child's attentional mechanisms on the caregivers and serves as a motivational mechanism that ensures language acquisition. The rewarding aspects of the attachment bond become part of the child's memory. The child, in encountering conspecifics more distal than immediate caregivers, responds to affiliative stimuli, such as friendly vocalizations, gestures, smiles, and touch, with positive appraisals and a desire to approach. The appraisals are communicated via the medial orbital cortex, with contextual information coming from the hippocampus and the amygdala. Dopaminergic innervation of the nucleus accumbens facilitates the integration of these various inputs and provides a “go” signal for motoric and cognitive approach and exploration of the affiliative target.

In second‐language acquisition, the affiliative phase comes first. The learner positively appraises one or more speakers of the target language and makes efforts to affiliate with them. If the efforts are successful, the learner will experience consummatory rewards generated by the opiate system. These rewards promote learning. As the child passes into adolescence and adulthood, changes take place in the hormone, peptide, and neurotransmitter systems that support affiliation in primary‐language acquisition. Dopamine levels increase until the onset of puberty and then gradually decrease throughout life. The opiate system is modulated by oxytocin and vasopressin. These neuromodulators are also found at high levels in the child and become lower as the individual ages. The abundance of dopamine, opiates, oxytocin, and vasopressin in the child's brain supports interaction with conspecifics and guarantees primary‐language acquisition. The reduction of these substances in the mature brain may contribute to the difficulties in second‐language acquisition experienced by older learners.

Chapter 5 reviews the brain circuits that regulate maternal behavior in nonhuman mammals. The medial preoptic area (MPOA) is essential for both the onset and maintenance of maternal behavior. Hormones and oxytocin act on the MPOA to stimulate the onset of maternal behavior. The neurotransmitters contained within MPOA neurons that may regulate maternal behavior are described, as are several neural inputs to the MPOA that regulate its output. A defensive neural circuit that inhibits maternal behavior in most virgin female mammals is described. MPOA output stimulates maternal behavior by depressing the defensive circuit while also activating neural circuits that underpin maternal motivation. MPOA output to the mesolimbic dopamine system is essential for appetitive maternal responses, while its output to the periaqueductal gray regulates consummatory responses. Synaptic plasticity within the MPOA-to-mesolimbic DA circuit is involved in the development of an enduring mother–infant bond.

Pleasure is central to the survival of individuals and species. The main challenge for the brain is to successfully balance the survival-related decision-making involved in optimizing resource allocation. The pursuit of fundamental rewards such as food and sex typically follows a cyclical time course with phases related to wanting, liking and satiety. Here, the evidence is presented for the brain networks and mechanisms involved in initiating, sustaining and terminating the various phases of the pleasure cycle. There are remarkable similarities between the pleasure cycles of different rewards including higher-order pleasures such as music and monetary reward. A better understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms of this pleasure cycle could potentially yield new insights into various disorders of consummatory behaviour. In particular, this could lead to better ways of balancing reward networks rather than maximizing one process at the expense of others. These interventions could in turn lead to more balanced states of positive well-being.

Both meaning and happiness occupy a central place in life in nature and in the life of spirit, and each may coexist as in the workings of imagination and idealization. Art unites our disparate desires to attain meaning and happiness, and hence transcends nature by a harmonious completion within the natural. This chapter examines art as the harmonization of meaning with happiness that culminates in the artificial resulting in a fulfillment of what is native to our being and therefore non-artificial. It considers how the relationship between imagination and idealization gives rise to consummatory goodness and also looks at Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s argument that music must “please the hearer” even in the presentation of unpleasant emotionality. Finally, the chapter discusses art as imaginary and the imaginary as an expression of feelings related to the imagination.

The chapter summarizes neuroscience research on what drives consumption of food and introduces the concepts of appetitive behaviours and consummatory behaviours, the former being what governs the processes of obtaining and preparing food, the latter the processes of consuming the food. The brain is viewed as seeking to maximize rewards, which involves learning what actions lead to rewards. The chapter examines conditions in which stimulus and reward are confused (dissociation). It further analyses habits as actions which are driven by a stimulus rather than being goal-directed and conditions in which goal-directed behaviour is abandoned for habitual behaviour, as in, for example, substance addiction, and the persistence of stimuli associated with it. Work on how people learn from others is reviewed and policy implications noted.

This chapter considers guanxi-like practices in a number of historical and social contexts, from the 1880s to the 1980s, when the term guanxi is first used. By doing so, many aspects of instrumental particularism typically ignored become evident. In late imperial literati circles, and in rural China up to the present time, gift-giving occurs without expectation of reciprocation but in order to acquire ‘protection’, to be let alone. The use of money in renqing, thought by many theorists today as problematic for guanxi, was routine in these circumstances. Reciprocal gift exchange in rural China begins with Communist collectivization in the 1950s. It is shown that the vast increase in the numbers of officials from this time, and the relative empowerment of peasants, extended the incidence of guanxi-like practices. Concurrently, a number of distinctive terms were used to describe these practices, until guanxi gained widespread usage in the 1980s.