Dear Reader,
We hope that you have enjoyed reading this brief introduction to Jaak Panksepp’s rich lifetime achievement. If you were already familiar with Jaak’s theory, we can only hope that you found something of relevance going beyond what you might have read in Jaak’s main works, Affective Neuroscience and The Archaeology of Mind. We have focused this book on the AN theory as origi-nally proposed by Jaak Panksepp. However, there are a great many talented scientists in the world studying the nature of emotions who have not been mentioned in this short volume.
Writing this small volume clearly needed a focus, and perhaps other researchers would have chosen to do so in another way.
If you are interested in ongoing research using the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales, we invite you to visit http://
www.anps-research.com. There you will find not only informa-tion on relevant scientific papers, but also informainforma-tion on the availability of the ANPS in different languages.
We would like to deeply thank Eileen A. Joy from punctum books for her trust in this project. We are delighted to see our book become part of the punctum books catalogue. Moreover, we thank Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei for providing us with the book design and last, but not least, Jessica Powell, for her work improving the readability of our book.
Finally, we thank Benjamin Becker, Markus Kiefer, Bernd Lachmann, Sebastian Markett, Halley Pontes, Martin Reuter, Dmitri Rozgonjuk, Rayna Sariyska, Helena Schmitt, Cornelia
Sindermann, Mareike Sittler, and Jennifer Wernicke for their support. They helped in different ways. You might have recog-nized that some of their names appeared in the book, because they conducted research we have written about. As mentioned, Martin introduced Christian to Jaak. Furthermore, Bernd, Dmitri, Helena, Cornelia, and Jennifer helped by checking the proofs and tables with the statistics provided in this book.
Thanks are also due to the many participants, not mentioned here by name, who supported our studies and colleagues who collaborated with us.
Believe it or not, from the initial idea of this book in 2016, it took us four years to finish this project. Now it’s done.
Sincerely yours,
Christian Montag & Kenneth L. Davis
Christian thanks…
I again thank Jaak for his support over the years. Without his great body of work, his enthusiasm, and creativity until his last days, the present book would not exist.
As also mentioned in the introduction, a big thanks goes to Ken for his support in finalizing this book. I could think of no one better to do it instead of Jaak. I am sure that Jaak would be delighted to see us collaborating on this project.
Finally, I thank my wife, Susanne, for being patient when I spend too much time writing at my computer. Although the present volume is a smaller one, it is my second popular science book, and writing always takes time. Hannah, my little girl, now you are in the world. Simply seeing you elicits strong CARE activ-ity in my brain.
The last thanks go to my parents, Udo and Ingrid. They have been a great support for more than 40 years now! I also thank my brother, Thomas, for being a great friend. I am eager to go to the next soccer match of 1.FC Köln with him (where we will both enjoy drinking Kölsch).
For Christian’s recent (research) activities, please visit http://
www.christianmontag.de or Twitter: @ChrisMontag77.
Jaak and Christian in 2012 in Pullman.
Kenneth thanks…
I want to thank Christian for inviting me to join this project, and I look forward to future collaborations with him. My wife, Nancy, (who always seamlessly blends into our affective neuroscience travels) and I visited Christian, Susanne, and Hannah “where the Dom is” in Cologne for a few days in July, 2019. Hannah was a delight, and Susanne CAREingly dedicated her whole weekend to taking care of us. Altogether, the hospitality, the Kölsch, and the bratwurst (plus watching the Rhine light up at night during the Kölner Lichter celebration) all exceeded expectations. And yes, Susanne and Christian took us to see the magnificent Dom, the cathedral of Cologne.
I want to thank Nancy for not only tolerating the extra work I do for my various affective neuroscience projects, which some-times leads to neglecting other things she would like me to do, but also for critically reading much of what I write and taking a real interest in Jaak and his wife, Anesa, who is a published author and who may (if we are lucky) write a book on her life with Jaak.
What can I say about Jaak that has not already been said?
He became my anchor in graduate school and introduced me to an amazing neuroscience world that frequently required no statistics, because the effects on behavior so clearly separated the treated subjects from the controls (such as the dramatic influence of low doses of morphine and its short-term blocker naloxone on the social behavior of dogs). He also nonjudgmentally tolerated my disappearance into the business world and then welcomed me back with a series of projects, from developing the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales to writing The Emotional Foundations of Personality, which, for me, became the equiva-lent of doing a postdoc, as I continued to learn from Jaak.
In the end, I see this book as part of an ongoing effort to promote what Jaak gave to the world: the most complete vision of humanity since Darwin, a vision that now neuroscientifically grounds our evolutionary mammalian heritage.
Ken and Christian in 2019 in Cologne, shortly before finalizing the book Animal Emotions
Appendix