Jaak Panksepp (1943-2017)

Presents an obituary for Jaak Panksepp, who died April 18, 2017. Panksepp reshaped the landscape of psychology by highlighting emotions and coincident feelings in basic and clinical research. Most of his career was spent convincing others that the key to understanding human mental illness was the understanding of primal emotional operating systems in conserved neural circuitry. His framework was carefully laid out in his book Affective Neuroscience: The Foundation of Human and Animal Emotions (1998). His controversial writings vigorously pushed for the acceptance of nonhuman animal feelings as primary states that link to motivated action and emotional expression. His agenda included developing animal models of mental illness with objective measures of emotion and removing the focus on higher level cognition. Panksepp completed the brunt of his research on the emotional operating systems while a professor at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) from 1972 to 1998. After retiring emeritus from Bowling Green, he was the Bailey Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science at Washington State University until his passing. (PsycINFO Database Record