Excitement

Excitement is anticipation, which places it before the event rather than in it, and the definition covers both kinds of anima without distinguishing between them. That is the whole difficulty with the emotion. In an exoself, excitement is a drive towards exosocial expansion and leads to a search for primary sources in creation and discovery, so an exoself is in a natural state of excitement every day in anticipation of primary euphoric interaction. In an endoself the same feeling points elsewhere. Excitement becomes avarice, the desire of possession, and the closest thing to joy available is the secondary euphoria obtainable through cruelty and destruction. Marsh's example is uncomfortable and deliberate: a predator sits down with a source as though sitting down to a meal, with excitement. The most prolific anima transfers appear to be through sex, violence, laughter, birth and death, and excitement attends anticipated or vicarious experience of any of them, which is why the same emotion accompanies both a wedding and a crowd gathering at a disaster. There is a trap in anticipation itself. Addiction to the excitement can lead to people never developing the ability to access anima at all, and especially primary anima, which requires exertion of the conscious will. The promise is easier than the thing promised, which is why an unfulfilled promise binds more tightly than a completed transaction.

Affective neuroscience distinguishes wanting from liking, following Kent Berridge's work showing that anticipatory desire and consummatory pleasure run on separate systems, and that addiction amplifies the first while eroding the second. Jaak Panksepp's seeking system describes an appetitive drive that is engaged by pursuit rather than by acquisition. Behavioural research on variable reward schedules shows why unpredictable promise is more compelling than reliable delivery. Marsh's account converges on the same conclusion about addiction to anticipation and derives it differently, from a distinction between two sources of energy rather than two neural systems, which lets her apply the same analysis to a crowd at a disaster and a person at a slot machine.