Jaak Panksepp

Jaak Panksepp (Tartu, 1943 – Bowling Green, Ohio, 2017) was a psychobiologist and neuroscientist of Estonian origin who became an American citizen. He is credited with coining the term "affective neuroscience", the name of the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. His work sits at the border between neuroscience, psychology and the study of animal behaviour.

He was born in Tartu while Estonia was under Soviet occupation after the Second World War, and his family moved to the United States when he was very young. He studied at the University of Pittsburgh and completed a PhD at the University of Massachusetts. He taught at Washington State University, where he held the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science, and later became Emeritus Professor at Bowling Green State University.

Panksepp argued that emotions were a legitimate subject of scientific study in animals, at a time when B. F. Skinner's behaviourism regarded them as irrelevant or suspect. He proposed seven biologically inherited primary affective systems, including SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY. His book Affective Neuroscience (1998) is his central work. The theory remains contested.

His influence reaches biological psychiatry, animal welfare research and popular writing on the emotional lives of mammals.