Lisa Feldman Barrett

Barrett grew up in Toronto, Canada. She says she was the first person in her extended family to attend university; her mother had a high school education, her stepfather an eighth-grade education, and the family was “working poor.”⁠[1]

At the University of Toronto she originally planned to become a doctor and paid her way by working several jobs at once; she encountered psychology when replacing a physics course and, after an honors thesis with a psychology professor, decided in her senior year not to attend medical school.⁠[2]

She says that in her first three years of graduate school she ran eight experiments trying to replicate a standard finding linking self-discrepancies to depression and anxiety, all of which failed, which turned her toward the study of emotion.⁠[1]

In 1992 she became an assistant professor of psychology at The Pennsylvania State University; she moved to Boston College in 1996, becoming associate professor in 1999 and professor in 2003.⁠[3]

In September 2007 she received a five-year, $2.5 million NIH Director’s Pioneer Award to develop her “conceptual act” model of emotion; she was one of 12 recipients that year and only the second psychologist to win the award.⁠[4]

From 2010 she was Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, and from 2013 University Distinguished Professor.⁠[3]

From 2011 to 2014 she served on the board of the Association for Psychological Science. APS described her as director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory who developed the conceptual-act model, which holds that basic emotions are not preformed biological entities; she was also a founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review.⁠[5]

In 2017 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published her How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (448 pages), which argues that emotions are not a fixed part of our biology but are constructed by the brain from predictions and take different forms in different cultures.⁠[6]

In December 2017 she gave the TED talk “You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them,” presenting her research and arguing that people have more control over their emotions than they think.⁠[7]

The talk drew 3.3 million online views and ranked among the 25 most popular TED Talks of 2018.⁠[8]

In May 2018 she was named president-elect of the Association for Psychological Science and had recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; that year she also received the APS Mentor Award.⁠[9]

In 2019 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience, one of 168 fellows chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants.⁠[10]

In July 2019 she and co-authors including Ralph Adolphs published a report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest noting that people scowl only about 25% of the time when angry, so emotion cannot reliably be inferred from facial movements alone, and raising concerns about uses of so-called facial expressions in industry, education, medicine and national security.⁠[11]

She was president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2019–2020 and wrote presidential columns; her final column, in May 2020, discussed research that could help those on the front lines of COVID-19.⁠[12]

She appeared on episode 129 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose description calls her a neuroscientist, psychologist and author; topics included the collective intelligence of human brains, the triune brain, the predicting brain, how the brain evolved, free will, dreams, emotions as human-constructed concepts, empathy, love and mortality.⁠[13]

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain was published on November 17, 2020; it uses metaphor and anecdote to survey brain science and rejects the old view of the brain as three layers of lizard brain, limbic system and neocortex.⁠[14]

She returned for episode 140, discussing falling in love, love at first sight, her writing process, the evolution of the human brain, the nature of evil, love as an evolutionary advantage, whether evolution has a direction, consciousness and book recommendations.⁠[15]

In 2021 the American Psychological Association gave her its Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions for her groundbreaking contributions to affective science; the citation said her conceptual act theory of emotion challenged prevailing views of emotions as basic and universal.⁠[16]

In 2024 she received the APS William James Fellow Award for lifetime achievement; she said her recent scholarship examines how William James’s writings have been misunderstood.⁠[2]

Barrett is University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior; she co-founded the Society for Affective Science.⁠[17]

She has published more than 280 peer-reviewed papers cited more than 100,000 times, and her TED talk has been viewed more than 7 million times.⁠[18]

Personal website: Public link: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

X: Public account: https://x.com/LFeldmanBarrett (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-feldman-barrett/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEh3eoysP6CjwjnvDrQp3Sg (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Northeastern University: Official website: https://www.northeastern.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]