PSYCHOLOGISTS from Estonia

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Estonian Psychologists of all time. This list of famous Estonian Psychologists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Wolfgang Köhler (1887 - 1967)

With an HPI of 65.40, Wolfgang Köhler is the most famous Estonian Psychologist.  His biography has been translated into 37 different languages on wikipedia.

Wolfgang Köhler (21 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology. During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In 1935 he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years, and did continuing research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Köhler as the 50th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

2. Jaak Panksepp (1943 - 2017)

With an HPI of 49.60, Jaak Panksepp is the 2nd most famous Estonian Psychologist.  His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.

Jaak Panksepp (June 5, 1943 – April 18, 2017) was an Estonian-American 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.