1. Jaak Panksepp was an Estonian-American neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term "affective neuroscience", the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion.
12 Facts About Jaak Panksepp
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Jaak Panksepp was 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.
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Jaak Panksepp was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals.
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Jaak Panksepp's family escaped the ravages of post-WWII Soviet occupation by moving to the United States when he was very young.
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Jaak Panksepp initially studied at University of Pittsburgh in 1964, and then completed a Ph.
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Jaak Panksepp was ridiculed for wanting to study the neuroscience of affect, and he struggled to find research funding.
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Jaak Panksepp conducted many experiments; in one with rats, he found that the rats showed signs of fear when cat hair was placed close to them, even though they had never been anywhere near a cat.
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Jaak Panksepp theorized from this experiment that it is possible laboratory research could routinely be skewed due to researchers with pet cats.
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Jaak Panksepp attempted to replicate the experiment using dog hair, but the rats displayed no signs of fear.
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Jaak Panksepp is well known for publishing a paper in 1979 suggesting that opioid peptides could play a role in the etiology of autism, which proposed that autism may be "an emotional disturbance arising from an upset in the opiate systems in the brain".
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Jaak Panksepp proposed what is known as "core-SELF" to be generating these affects.
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Jaak Panksepp died on April 18,2017, from cancer at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio, at the age of 73.