Jaak Panksepp
Estonian-born American neuroscientist who coined the term affective neuroscience
Neuroscientist born in Tartu who worked at Bowling Green State University and Washington State University. He coined the term affective neuroscience and described seven emotional systems in mammals, partly from experiments on rats, including tickling.
Why this person matters
Panksepp argued that emotions originate in older brain areas such as the amygdala and hypothalamus, against the view that they come from the cortex. His rat play studies made animal emotion a topic for experimental work, though his interpretation is debated.
Main contributions
Affective neuroscience
He coined the term affective neuroscience for the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. His 1998 textbook Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions is described by the Society for Neuroscience as a classic.
Seven primary emotional systems
He identified neural circuits for seven emotions shared by mammals. The positive ones were seeking, lust, care and play. The negative ones were rage, fear and panic.
Rat play and laughter
In the late 1990s at Bowling Green he tickled laboratory rats and recorded ultrasonic chirps. A graduate student adapted a bat detector to capture the sounds, and Panksepp concluded that they signalled joy.
Context and limits
The seven-system theory is contested. Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that the claim that basic emotional systems are hard-coded at birth is a hypothesis, not established fact, and that much evidence conflicts with it. The evidence comes largely from animal experiments, so attributing feelings to the animals is an interpretation. Panksepp challenged the behaviourist tradition, and a reference article reports that he was ridiculed and struggled to get funding.
In your introductory course
Motivation and emotion.Panksepp appears in chapters on the biology of emotion, and in discussions of animal research and play. Students meet the seven emotional systems and the debate over animal feelings.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 10.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1969
He completed a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
- 1979
He published A neurochemical theory of autism in Trends in Neurosciences, proposing that autism might involve disturbance of the brain's opiate systems.
- 1998
He published Affective Neuroscience.
Sources
- Society for Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp obituarySociety or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Jaak PankseppReference work. Reference article inspected.