Jaak Panksepp

Jaak Panksepp (1943 to 2017) was an Estonian-American neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term affective neuroscience for the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. Born in Tartu, Estonia, he moved to the United States as a child and took his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts. He was emeritus professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University and held the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science at Washington State University. He worked against a behaviorist climate that treated animal emotion with suspicion, and became known for studying laughter in rats. He proposed seven inherited primary affective systems, named SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY, a view that remains contested; Lisa Feldman Barrett calls it a hypothesis rather than a fact. His 1998 book is titled Affective Neuroscience.