Dr. Jaak Panksepp-Keynote
Dr. Jaak Panksepp
Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology and Physiology
College of Veterinary Medicine
University of Washington
Keynote Presentation
Saturday July 17th, 2010
“Instinctual Systems Common to Man and Animals: Implications for Effective Psychotherapeutic Treatment”
Dr. Panksepp is renowned for coining the term, “affective neuroscience” to describe 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 such rats.
Dr. Panksepp’s present research at the University of Washington is devoted to the analysis of the neuroanatomical and neurochemical mechanisms of emotional behaviors (in the emerging fields of affective and social neurosciences), wiith a focus on understanding how various affective processes are evolutionarily organized in the brain. He and his research team look for linkages to psychiatric disorders and drug addiction. They conduct research on the brain “instinctual” mechanisms of fear, anger, separation distress (panic), investigatory processes an anticipatory eagerness, as well as rough-and-tumble play. They are especially interested in how various brain neuropeptide systems regulate emotional feelings and social bonds.
Prior to the ongoing work on emotional systems, Panksepp studied hypothalamic mechanisms of energy balance control and neural regulation of sleep-waking states. In addition to 300+ scientific articles, Panksepp has co-edited the multivolume Handbook of the Hypothalamus and of Emotions and Psychopathology, a series in Advances in Biological Psychiatry and most recently a Textbook of Biological Psychiatry (Wiley, 2004), His other textbook, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford, 1998), has helped inaugurate a new field of inquiry which attempts to probe the affective infrastructure of the mammalian brain. His working assumption is that all of consciousness was built on affective value systems during the long course of brain evolution.