Affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, speaking as part of Yale's Experts in Emotion series, discusses his research into animal models of human emotion. He recounts what drew him to studying emotion, then spends the bulk of the interview on his central discoveries, work rooted in identifying basic emotional circuits shared across mammalian brains through studies of animal behavior. He addresses where he sees the field heading next, including future breakthroughs he anticipates in understanding the neural basis of feeling, and closes with practical advice for students who want to enter emotion research. The format is a structured interview with chapter breaks rather than a classroom lecture, but Panksepp's answers amount to a compact overview of his career-long argument that emotions have measurable biological substrates that can be studied experimentally in animals and applied to human psychology and psychiatry.