About Us
Jaak Panksepp, Ph.D.
Jaak Panksepp is currently the Baily Endowed Professor of Animal Well-Being Science at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University and Distinguished Research Professor of Psychobiology, Emeritus, at Bowling Green State University, as well as Head of Affective Neuroscience Research at the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics of Northwestern University. He 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, MA. His present research is devoted to the analysis of the neuroanatomical and neurochemical mechanisms of emotional behaviors, in the emerging field of affective neuroscience, with a focus on understanding how separation responses, social bonding, social play, fear, anticipatory processes, and drug craving are organized in the brain, especially with reference to psychiatric disorders. He was Co-Editor of the multivolume Handbook of the Hypothalamus (1979-1981) and of Emotions and Psychopathology (1988), and he has also edited a short series of Advances in Biological Psychiatry (1995, 1996), the monograph on Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (1998, Oxford University Press) and most recently the Textbook of Biological Psychiatry (2004, Wiley).
His general research orientation is that a detailed understanding of basic emotional systems, especially at the neurochemical level, will highlight the basic sources of human values and the nature and genesis of emotional disorders in humans, with current work focusing on depression. He has helped develop the controversial opioid-antagonist therapy for autistic children based on his pre-clinical investigations into brain circuits that control social behaviors and is pursuing new therapies for the treatment of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD).
His current research is devoted to developing new pre-clinical models of depression based on the understanding of primary-process emotional systems, especially those related to basic social processes such as separation-distress and playfulness. He is currently most interested in brain opioids, dynorphin, oxytocin, prolactin, neurotensin, cholecystokinin, substance P, corticotrophins and various pituitary hormone-releasing hormones and how they relate to normal and abnormal affective states. He is a member of a growing international community of active investigators who are doing empirical work on the neurobiological nature of basic emotions, with an eye to psychiatric relevance. He has published more than 400 scientific papers on the above topics.
He is current Research Co-Director of HDRF, along with Dr. Mark Solms, helping to cultivate novel approaches to the understanding and treatment of depression.
Publications: Click here for PubMed