Jaak Panksepp – Notre Dame Symposium on Human Nature and Early Experience

Learn more about the Evolved Nest at 2010 Notre Dame Symposium to Address Early Human Experience About Jaak Panksepp Jaak Panksepp (June 5, 1943 – April 18, 2017) was an Estonian neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term “affective neuroscience“, the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals. About the Symposium The University of Notre Dame’s Center for Children and Families is hosted a symposium, Human Nature and Early Experience: Addressing the ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness,’ on October 10 to 12, 2010 at McKenna Hall on Notre Dame’s campus. An international collection of renowned scholars from several disciplines presented research on the psychological, anthropological, and biological conditions related to the optimal brain and body system development in human beings. Experts’ presentations reexamined the influence of early experience on child outcomes, and how human beings’ emotions develop and function. There is growing evidence that particular childrearing practices positively or negatively impact brain development, and evidence that the ways we are rearing our children today are not the ways humans are designed to thrive. Notre Dame Anthropology Professor Agustin Fuentes; James McKenna, the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, ., Professor of Anthropology and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab; and Notre Dame Psychology Professor Darcia F. Narvaez are among the scholars who spoke at the event. Narvaez discussed three recent studies she led that show a relationship between child rearing practices common in foraging hunter-gatherer societies (how we humans have spent about 99 percent of our history) and better mental health, greater empathy and conscience development, and higher intelligence in children.