Lisa Feldman Barrett

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University,^[1] where she focuses on the study of emotion.^[2] She is director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review.^[3]

Education

Born in Toronto, Canada in 1963, Barrett obtained her Bachelor of Science in Psychology with Honors at the University of Toronto. From there she completed a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, and a Clinical Internship at the University of Manitoba Medical School. During her graduate training, Barrett developed her current hypothesis on emotion, the conceptual-act model of emotion.

Professional history

At the beginning of her career, Dr. Barrett's research focused on the structure of affect, having developed experience-sampling methods^[4] and open-source software to study emotional experience. Dr. Barrett and members at IASL 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.

Emotion views

Previous views on emotion take a natural kinds approach, assuming that a stimulus evokes a discrete causal mechanism in the brain and body, producing a unique, response signature that can be readily recognized by others. In this perspective, emotions are innate, and all people are born with the capacity to feel the same core set of emotions. Barrett’s lab has conducted major reviews of the scientific literature showing that the majority of the existing research does not support the natural kind view. Her conceptual-act model of emotion holds that emotions are not biological entities that form the building blocks of our experience. Instead, the model hypothesizes that emotions are constructed events that arise from the simultaneous combination of three more basic psychological primitives:

Core affect

An omnipresent, neurophysiological state described by two properties, hedonic valence and arousal, that can be consciously accessed.

According to this model, perceptual information is one part of a distributed system that involves cortical areas of the brain, which are traditionally considered cognitive, and subcortical areas, which are traditionally considered affective. This model carries with it the additional implication that affect and cognition are co-constitutive of if not identical to one another.^[5][6] The relevant cortical (cognitive) areas are the sensory cortices, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Rather than these cortical areas cognitively regulating activity in the amygdala as is often conceived, they play a role in guiding motor responses on affective stimuli. Additionally, the traditional affective areas in the subcortex implicated in affective information, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), play both excitatory and inhibitory roles in cortical (i.e. cognitive) processes through direct and reciprocal connections.

The dynamic interaction of the various systems creates an overall state that could be described as a “barometer” of sorts for the relation of the organism to its internal homeostatic condition and external relationship with the environment.^[7][8] This “core affective state” literally plays a role in what one sees in the world around them.^[9][10] The subcortical (i.e. affective) areas orient the organism toward the stimuli in the world that play significant roles in goal-seeking behavior. The cortical areas help associate stimuli with their affective value creating a kind of “working memory” as well as guiding appropriate responsive behavior, which further acts upon the subcortical areas for additional orientation. Things stand out as directly relevant or interesting as part of the act of seeing. All of this happens without any need for inferential thinking as what one sees and orients toward has already been determined by the processing in the core affect system. According to the primary proponents of core affect, there is a gate-like inhibition mechanism that serves as a central executive.^[11][12]

Conceptualization (categorization)

The ability to automatically make meaning of sensory stimulation (from the world and/or the body) by bringing stored, situation-specific representations of categories (e.g., "anger") to bear.

Executive attention

Controlled attention, also referred to as "goal-directed," "top-down" or "endogenous" attention, that maintains or enhances the activation of some representations while suppressing others.

In the model, these psychological ingredients not only combine to create "emotions," but also are general ingredients of the mind, important for creating "memories," "thoughts," "beliefs," "perceptions," "attitudes," "the self," and so on.

Honors and awards

• Elected Fellow, Society of Experimental Psychologists, 2013.
• Award for Distinguished Service in Psychological Science, American Psychological Association, 2013.^[13]
• Elected Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, 2012.
• Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award, Northeastern University, 2012^[14]
• Arts in Academics award, University of Waterloo, 2010^[15]
• Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2008
• Kavli Fellow in the Frontiers of Science Program,^[16] National Academy of Sciences, Frontiers of Science 2008
• NIH Director's Pioneer Award, 2007-2012.^[17]
• Career Trajectory Award, Society of Experimental Social Psychology 2006 ^[18]
• Elected Fellow, American Psychological Association, 2005
• Elected Fellow, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2005.
• Elected fellow, Association for Psychological Science,^[19] 2003
• Independent Scientist Research (K02) Award, NIMH 2002-2007

Selected publications

• Barrett, L. F., & Bar, M. (2009). See it with feeling: Affective predictions in the human brain. Royal Society Phil Trans B, 364, 1325-1334.
• Barrett, L. F., & Bliss-Moreau, E. (2009). Affect as a psychological primitive. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 167-218.
• Barrett, L. F., Lindquist, K., Bliss-Moreau, E., Duncan, S., Gendron, M., Mize, J., & Brennan, L. (2007). Of mice and men: Natural kinds of emotion in the mammalian brain? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 297-312
• Barrett, L. F., Lindquist, K., & Gendron, M. (2007). Language as a context for emotion perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 11, 327-332.
• Barrett, L. F. (2006). Emotions as natural kinds? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 28-58.
• Barrett, L. F. (2006). Solving the emotion paradox: Categorization and the experience of emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 20-46.
• Barrett, L. F., & Barrett, D. J. (2001). Computerized experience-sampling: How technology facilitates the study of conscious experience. Social Science Computer Review, 19, 175-185.
• Feldman, L. A. (1995b). Valence focus and arousal focus: Individual differences in the structure of affective experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 153-166

See also

• Affective neuroscience
• Conceptual-act model of emotion
• Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

External links

• Publications
• ESP (Experience Sampling Program): free, open-source software for scientists

References