Lisa Feldman Barrett

Last updated
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Lisa Feldman.jpg
Born1963 (age 6061)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
NationalityCanadian
CitizenshipUnited States, Canada
Alma mater
Known for Theory of constructed emotion
Spouse Daniel J. Barrett
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis On the failure to differentiate anxiety and depression in self-report  (1992)
Doctoral advisor Mike Ross
Website lisafeldmanbarrett.com , affective-science.org

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University, [1] where she focuses on affective science. [2] She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. [3] Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review . [4] Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science.

Contents

Biography

Barrett was born in 1963 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to a working poor family and was the first member of her extended family to attend university. [5] After graduating from the University of Toronto with honors, she pursued a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Waterloo with the goal of becoming a therapist, [6] until a frustrating puzzle sidetracked her from a clinical career. As a graduate student, she failed eight times to replicate a simple experiment, finally realizing that her seeming failed attempts were, in fact, successfully replicating a previously undiscovered phenomenon. [7] The resulting research direction became her life's work: understanding the nature of emotion in the brain. [8] Following a clinical internship at the University of Manitoba Medical School, she held professorships in psychology at Penn State University, Boston College, and Northeastern University. Over two decades, she transitioned from clinical psychology into social psychology, psychophysiology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. [9]

Barrett is most inspired by William James, Wilhelm Wundt, and Charles Darwin. [10] In 2019–2020, she served as president of the Association for Psychological Science. [11] From 2018–2021, she was ranked in the top one percent of the most-cited scientists in the world over a ten-year period. [12]

In addition to academic work, Barrett has written two science books for the public, How Emotions are Made (2017) and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020), and her TED talk was among the 25 most popular worldwide in 2018. [13]

Professional history

Study of human emotions

At the beginning of her career, Barrett's research focused on the structure of affect, having developed experience-sampling methods [14] and open-source software to study emotional experience. Barrett and members at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory study the nature of emotion broadly from social-psychological, psychophysiological, cognitive science, and neuroscience perspectives, and take inspiration from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. They also explore the role of emotion in vision and other psychological phenomena.

In 2010, she joined the psychology faculty at Northeastern University. Before that, she held academic positions at Boston College (1996-2010) and was an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Pennsylvania State University.

Her research has focused on the main issues in the science of emotions such as:

Theory of constructed emotion

Barrett developed her current theory of constructed emotion originally during her graduate training.

According to Barrett, emotions are "not universal, but vary from culture to culture" (see Emotions and culture). She says that emotions "are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment." [15]

Honors and awards

Books

See also

Related Research Articles

This article is a general timeline of psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affect (psychology)</span> Experience of feeling or emotion

Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood. In psychology, "affect" refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. It encompasses a wide range of emotional states and can be positive or negative. Affect is a fundamental aspect of human experience and plays a central role in many psychological theories and studies. It can be understood as a combination of three components: emotion, mood, and affectivity. In psychology, the term "affect" is often used interchangeably with several related terms and concepts, though each term may have slightly different nuances. These terms encompass: emotion, feeling, mood, emotional state, sentiment, affective state, emotional response, affective reactivity, disposition. Researchers and psychologists may employ specific terms based on their focus and the context of their work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mahzarin Banaji</span> Indian social psychologist (born 1959)

Mahzarin Rustum Banaji FBA is an American psychologist of Indian origin at Harvard University, known for her work popularizing the concept of implicit bias in regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other factors.

The theory of constructed emotion is a theory in affective science proposed by Lisa Feldman Barrett to explain the experience and perception of emotion. The theory posits that instances of emotion are constructed predictively by the brain in the moment as needed. It draws from social construction, psychological construction, and neuroconstruction.

Michael Inzlicht is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto recognized in the areas of social psychology and neuroscience. Although he has published papers on the topics of prejudice, academic performance, and religion, his most recent interests have been in the topics of self-control, where he borrows methods from affective and cognitive neuroscience to understand the underlying nature of self-control, including how it is driven by motivation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John T. Cacioppo</span> American academic

John Terrence Cacioppo was the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He founded the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and was the director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago. He co-founded the field of social neuroscience and was member of the department of psychology, department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, and the college until his death in March 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Berntson</span>

Gary Berntson is an emeritus professor at Ohio State University with appointments in the departments of psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics. He is an expert in psychophysiology, neuroscience, biological psychology, and with his colleague John Cacioppo, a founding father of social neuroscience. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying behavioral and affective processes, with a special emphasis on social cognition.

Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition. Kuhl currently serves as an associate editor for the journals Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tania Singer</span> German social neuroscientist (1969-)

Tania Singer is a German psychologist and social neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Max Planck Society's Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010, she became the inaugural chair of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich and was the co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich. Her research focuses on the developmental, neuronal, and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behavior and social emotions such as compassion and empathy. She is founder and principal investigator of the ReSource project, one of the largest longitudinal studies on the effects of mental training on brain plasticity as well as mental and physical health, co-funded by the European Research Council. She also collaborates with the macro-economist Dennis Snower on research on caring economics. Singer's Caring Economics: Conversations on Altruism and Compassion, Between Scientists, Economists, and the Dalai Lama was published in 2015. She is the daughter of the neuroscientist Wolf Singer.

Suzanne C. Segerstrom is a professor of Psychology and biostatistician at the University of Kentucky. She is known for her clinical research on optimism and pessimism in relation to health, stress, and general well-being.

Naomi I. Eisenberger is a social psychologist known for her research on the neural basis of social pain and social connection. She is professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she directs the Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and co-directs the Social Cognitive Science laboratory.

Elizabeth Anya Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University in the Department of Psychology. She is a cognitive neuroscientist known for her research at the intersection of memory, learning, and emotion. She was the recipient of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Distinguished Scholar Award and the 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, as well as other honors and awards in her field. Phelps was honored with the 2018 Thomas William Salmon Lecture and Medal in Psychiatry at the New York Academy of Medicine. She received the 2019 William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS) which acknowledged how her "multidisciplinary body of research has probed the influence of emotion across cognitive and behavioral domains using novel imaging techniques and neuropsychological studies grounded in animal models of learning."

Batja Mesquita is a Dutch social psychologist, a cultural psychologist and an affective scientist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where she studies the role of culture in emotions, and of emotions in culture and society. She is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven.

Eliza Bliss-Moreau is a core scientist in the Neuroscience and Behaviour Unit at the California National Primate Research Center and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. Her work focuses on the biology of emotions in humans and animals, and since the Zika virus epidemic she has been studying the effects of the virus on the developing brain.

Kristen A. Lindquist is a psychologist and affective neuroscientist whose research focuses on language, emotions, and culture. Lindquist is known for her work on emotion words, suggesting that when speakers of different languages talk about common emotions like love, they may not mean the same thing. Her findings run counter to the view that there are universal emotions that are experienced the same across cultures. Lindquist is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Director of Carolina Affective Science Lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gemma Modinos</span> Spanish neuropsychologist

Gemma Modinos, born 1980 in Castellar del Vallès, is a Spanish neuropsychologist. She works as a Reader of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience of King's College London. She was a Wellcome Trust & The Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow (2017-2023) and is a Group leader at the MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King's College London. She was 2020-2022 Chair of the Young Academy of Europe, where she directed European efforts to optimise science policy from a youthful perspective; and 2020-2022 Junior Member of the Executive Board of the Schizophrenia International Research Society. She is known for her work revealing the role of emotion-related brain mechanisms and the neurotransmitters GABA and glutamate in the development of psychosis, and investigating how targeting these mechanisms can help design new therapeutic strategies.

Leah H. Somerville is an American psychologist who is a professor at Harvard University. She is a member of the Human Connectome Project. Somerville was awarded the 2022 National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award.

Patricia Ann Reuter-Lorenz is an American psychologist who is the Michael I. Posner Collegiate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. Reuter-Lorenz is Chair of the School of Psychology and researches the cognitive mechanisms of attention. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aikaterini Fotopoulou</span> Greek psychologist and academic

Aikaterini Fotopoulou is a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who is a professor at the University College London Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology. She is the co-founder and Treasurer of the International Association for the Study of Affective Touch and the President-Elect of the European Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Society. She is also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and past co-chair of its International Convention, and the past President of the Psychology Section of the British Science Association. Fotopoulou was the past Director of the London Neuropsychoanalysis Centre, Secretary of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society and coordinator of the London Neuropsychoanalysis Group.

Nim Tottenham is a professor of psychology at Columbia University, where she leads the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. Her research highlighted fundamental changes in amygdala-prefrontal cortex circuitry across childhood and adolescence and the influential role of early experiences on the developmental trajectories of these circuits.

References

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