Dr. Jaak Panksepp is a psychologist, a psychobiologist, a neuroscientist, the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was also Head of Affective Neuroscience Research, Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics, Northwestern University. His present research is devoted to the analysis of the neuroanatomical and neurochemical mechanisms of emotional behaviors, with a focus on understanding how various affective processes are evolutionarily organized in the brain, and looking for linkages to psychiatric disorders and drug addiction. While studying rough and tumble play in rats, Dr. Panksepp discovered that "laughter" in rats (chirping at around 50 KHz) is increased markedly in young rats by manual tickling. He is pursuing new therapies for the treatment of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD), and depression.
Panksepp is the author of 300+ articles and co-edited the multivolume Handbook of the Hypothalamus and of Emotions and Psychopathology, a series in Advances in Biological Psychiatry and a Textbook of Biological Psychiatry (Wiley, 2004). His other textbook, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford, 1998), has helped inaugurate a new field of inquiry which attempts to probe the affective infrastructure of the mammalian brain. His latest book, written with Lucy Biven, is The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology (2012)
Jaak Panksepp
Jaak Panksepp’s books on Amazon