Speakers

Jaak Panksepp, Ph.D.
Washington State University
Presentation: Do Animals Experience Various Basic Emotions? The Evidence Overwhelmingly Says Yes!

Jaak Panksepp, Ph.D., is a professor and Baily-endowed chair of Animal Well-Being Science at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University. He is also the head of affective neuroscience research at the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University and research co-director for the nonprofit organization Hope for Depression Research Foundation.  

Dr. Panksepp’s scientific contributions include more than 300 papers devoted to the study of basic emotional and motivational processes of the mammalian brain. His recent work has focused primarily on the subcortical brain mechanisms of sadness (separation distress) and joy (play and animal laughter), work that has implications for the treatment of autism and ADHD. His work is informed by exploring the consequences of basic knowledge about emotional endophenotypes for better understanding of human mental health. His monograph Affective Neuroscience (Oxford, 1998) outlined ways to understand brain affective processes mechanistically, and he recently edited a Textbook of Biological Psychiatry (Wiley, 2004).

Dr. Panksepp did his graduate work at the University of Massachusetts in behavioral neuroscience (Ph.D., 1969) and then pursued postdoctoral work in feeding and nutrition at the University of Sussex in England and sleep physiology at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Mass.