Jaak Panksepp

Jaak Panksepp (born June 5, 1943 in Tartu) is an Estonian-bornneuroscientist, a psychobiologist, 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. Panksepp coined the term 'affective neuroscience', the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He is known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals.

Panksepp has 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. Panksepp theorized from this experiment that it is possible laboratory research could routinely be skewed due to researchers with pet cats. He attempted to replicate the experiment using dog hair, but the rats displayed no signs of fear.

In the 1999 documentary Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry, he is shown to comment on the research of joy in rats: the tickling of domesticated rats made them produce a high-pitch sound which was hypothetically identified as laughter.

Panksepp is also 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".

Temple Grandin draws extensively on Panksepp's work in describing how an appreciation of the primal emotions of PLAY, PANIC/GRIEF, FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, LUST and CARE and what triggers them can improve human care of stock animals and the welfare of companion animals.

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