Contemporary Authors

• How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2017
• The Wisdom in Feeling: Psychological Processes in Emotional intelligence ( foreword by John D. Mayer) Guilford Press (New York, NY), c. 2002
• Emotion and Consciousness Guilford Press (New York, NY), 2005
• Handbook of Emotions Guilford Press (New York, NY), 2008
• The Mind in Context Guilford Press (New York, NY), c. 2010
• The Psychological Construction of Emotion Guilford Press (New York, NY), 2015

1. How emotions are made : the secret life of the brain LCCN 2016038354 Type of material Book Personal name Barrett, Lisa Feldman, author. Main title How emotions are made : the secret life of the brain / Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD. Published/Produced Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Description xv, 425 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780544133310 (hardback) CALL NUMBER BF561 .B337 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. The psychological construction of emotion LCCN 2014025248 Type of material Book Main title The psychological construction of emotion / edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett, James A. Russell. Published/Produced New York : The Guilford Press, [2015] Description xiii, 479 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781462516971 (hardback) Shelf Location FLM2015 148932 CALL NUMBER BF531 .P776 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. The mind in context LCCN 2009039737 Type of material Book Main title The mind in context / edited by Batja Mesquita, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Eliot R. Smith. Published/Created New York : Guilford Press, c2010. Description x, 371 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9781606235539 (hbk.) 1606235532 (hbk.) CALL NUMBER BF315.2 .M56 2010 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2016 067996 CALL NUMBER BF315.2 .M56 2010 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 4. Handbook of emotions LCCN 2007042332 Type of material Book Main title Handbook of emotions / edited by Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. Edition 3rd ed. Published/Created New York : Guilford Press, c2008. Description xvi, 848 p., [4] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 26 cm. ISBN 9781593856502 (cloth : alk. paper) 1593856504 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0804/2007042332.html CALL NUMBER BF561 .H35 2008 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. Emotion and consciousness LCCN 2005001276 Type of material Book Main title Emotion and consciousness / edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal & Piotr Winkielman. Published/Created New York : Guilford Press, 2005. Description xii, 420 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 159385188X (cloth) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip056/2005001276.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0621/2005001276-b.html CALL NUMBER BF311 .E4855 2005 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. The wisdom in feeling : psychological processes in emotional intelligence LCCN 2002006983 Type of material Book Main title The wisdom in feeling : psychological processes in emotional intelligence / edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Peter Salovey ; foreword by John D. Mayer. Published/Created New York : Guilford Press, c2002. Description xx, 444 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 1572307854 (alk. paper) Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bios/guilford051/2002006983.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/guilford051/2002006983.html Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/guilford041/2002006983.html Sample text http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0650/2002006983-s.html CALL NUMBER BF576 .W57 2002 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Lisa Feldman Barrett - https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/about/

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  Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

  Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. In addition to the book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Dr. Barrett has published over 200 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press.

  Dr. Barrett received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for her revolutionary research on emotion in the brain. These highly competitive, multimillion dollar awards are given to scientists of exceptional creativity who are expected to transform biomedical and behavioral research.

  Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Barrett has testified before Congress, presented her research to the FBI, consulted to the National Cancer Institute, appeared on Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and been a featured guest on public television and worldwide radio programs. She is also an elected fellow of Canada’s most prestigious national organization of scholars, the Royal Society of Canada (analogous to the National Academy in the United States).

  Contact

  Copyright 2016–2017 Lisa Feldman Barrett
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• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Feldman_Barrett

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  Lisa Feldman Barrett
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Lisa Feldman Barrett
  Born 1963
  Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  Residence Boston, Massachusetts, United States
  Nationality Canadian
  Citizenship United States
  Alma mater University of Toronto, University of Waterloo
  Known for Theory of constructed emotion
  Spouse(s) Daniel J. Barrett
  Awards NIH Director's Pioneer Award
  Website lisafeldmanbarrett.com, www.affective-science.org
  Scientific career
  Fields Cognitive neuroscience, psychology
  Institutions Northeastern University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston College, Pennsylvania State University
  Thesis (1992)
  Doctoral advisor Mike Ross
  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]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Education
  2 Professional history
  3 Honors and awards
  4 Selected publications
  4.1 Books
  4.2 Selected academic papers
  5 See also
  6 External links
  7 References
  Education[edit]
  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 the initial insights for her current theory of constructed emotion.

  Professional history[edit]
  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.

  Honors and awards[edit]
  APS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2018.[5]
  Heritage Wall of Fame, Foundation for Personality & Social Psychology, 2016.[6]
  Diener Award in Social Psychology, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2014.[7]
  Elected Fellow, Society of Experimental Psychologists, 2013.
  Award for Distinguished Service in Psychological Science, American Psychological Association, 2013.[8]
  Elected Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, 2012.
  Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award, Northeastern University, 2012[9]
  Arts in Academics award, University of Waterloo, 2010[10]
  Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2008
  Kavli Fellow in the Frontiers of Science Program,[11] National Academy of Sciences, Frontiers of Science 2008
  NIH Director's Pioneer Award, 2007-2012.[12]
  Career Trajectory Award, Society of Experimental Social Psychology 2006 [13]
  Elected Fellow, American Psychological Association, 2005
  Elected Fellow, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2005.
  Elected fellow, Association for Psychological Science,[14] 2003
  Independent Scientist Research (K02) Award, NIMH 2002-2007
  Selected publications[edit]
  Books[edit]
  How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. ISBN 0544133315.
  UK edition published by Macmillan, 2017. ISBN 1509837493.
  Selected academic papers[edit]
  Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi: 10.1093/scan/nsw154.
  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[edit]
  Affective neuroscience
  Theory of constructed emotion
  Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
  External links[edit]
  Publications
  References[edit]
  Jump up ^ Northeastern University Psychology Department
  Jump up ^ "The Faces and Minds of Psychology," The Association for Psychological Science
  Jump up ^ Emotion Review
  Jump up ^ Hektner, Joel M.; Jennifer A. Schmidt; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (September 2006). Experience Sampling Method: Measuring the Quality of Everyday Life.. SAGE Publications. p. 37 et al. ISBN 1-4129-4923-8.
  Jump up ^ APS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement
  Jump up ^ Wall of Fame and individual entry
  Jump up ^ Carol and Ed Diener Award
  Jump up ^ APA Award for Distinguished Service in Psychological Science
  Jump up ^ Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Awards 2012
  Jump up ^ Arts in Academics award
  Jump up ^ Kavli Frontiers of Science
  Jump up ^ Pioneer award announcement
  Jump up ^ 2006 Career Trajectory Award
  Jump up ^ Fellow status in APS
  Authority control
  WorldCat Identities VIAF: 64284781
  Categories: American psychologistsAmerican women psychologistsCanadian psychologistsEmotion psychologistsAmerican neuroscientistsWomen neuroscientistsCognitive neuroscientistsNortheastern University facultyHarvard Medical School people1963 birthsLiving people
  Navigation menu
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• The Verge - https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/10/15245690/how-emotions-are-made-neuroscience-lisa-feldman-barrett

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  Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how emotions are made
  6
  We don’t all make the same expressions when we’re sad
  by Angela Chen@chengela Apr 10, 2017, 3:49pm EDT
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  Image: Nummenmaa L, Glerean E, Hari R and Hietanen JK: Bodily maps of emotions. PNAS 2014, 111: 646–651
  I am known for being hard to read, to the point that friends complain that they can never tell what I’m thinking by looking at my face. But, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, it’s possible that they might remain confused even if my face were more expressive.

  Barrett, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, is the author of How Emotions Are Made. She argues that many of the key beliefs we have about emotions are wrong. It’s not true that we all feel the same things, that anyone can “read” other people’s faces, and it’s not true that emotions are things that happen to us.

  The Verge spoke to Barrett about her new view of emotion, what this means for emotion-prediction startups, and whether we can feel an emotion if we don’t have the word for it.

  This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

  You argue that emotions are constructed by our brains. How does that differ from what we knew before?

  The classical view assumes that emotions happen to you. Something happens, neurons get triggered, and you make these stereotypical expressions you can’t control. It says that people scowl when they’re angry and pout when they’re sad, that everyone around the world not only makes the same expressions, but that you’re born with the capacity to recognize them automatically.

  In my view, a face doesn’t speak for itself when it comes to emotion, ever. I’m not saying that when your brain constructs a strong feeling that there are no physical cues to the strength of your feeling. People do smile when they’re happy or scowl when they’re sad. What I’m saying is that there’s not a single obligatory expression. And emotions aren’t some objective thing, they’re learned and something that our brains construct.

  You write about studies where you show someone a face and ask them to identify the emotions, and people consistently get it wrong, like confusing fear with anxiety. But fear and anxiety seem pretty similar to me. Do people also confuse emotions that are really far apart, like happiness and guilt?

  It’s interesting that you say that guilt and happiness are far apart. I often show people a picture of the top half of my daughter’s face and people say she looks sad or guilty or deflated, and then I show the whole image and and she’s actually in a full-blown episode of pleasure because she’s at a chocolate museum.

  If you were to pit a face against anything else, it will always lose. If you show a face on its own, versus if you pair it with a voice or a body posture or a scenario, the face is very ambiguous in its meaning. There are studies where they actually took people’s whole faces but removed the bodies. People were expressing negativity or positivity, and people mistake all the time without the context. When you take a super positive face and stick it in a negative situation, people experience the face as more negative. They don’t just interpret the face as negative, they actually change how they look at the face when you use eye-tracking software.

  The expressions that we’ve been told are the correct ones are just stereotypes and people express in many different ways.

  What about things like resting bitch face? That’s a topic you hear about a lot — where people say that they can “tell” someone is a bitch, but women protest that their face is “just that like.”

  We’ve done research on this and resting bitch face is a neutral face. When you look at it structurally, there’s nothing negative in the face. People are using the context or their knowledge about that person to see more negativity in the face.

  I’m curious what all this means for affective computing, or the startups that try to analyze your facial expression to figure out how you’re feeling. Does this mean their research is futile?

  As they are currently pursuing it, most companies are going to fail. If people use the classical view to guide the development of their technology — if you’re trying to build software or technology to identify scowls or frowns and pouts and so on and assume that means anger, good luck.

  But if affective computing and other technology in this area were adjusted slightly in their goals, they hold the potential to revolutionize the science of emotion. We need to be able to track people’s movements accurately, and it would be so helpful to measure their movements and as much of the external and internal context as possible.

  So we know that emotions don’t have a universal look. Can you explain more about your argument that emotions are constructed? My understanding is that your claim is like this: you have a basic feeling — like “pleasant” or “unpleasant” — and bodily sensations, which are sometimes triggered by the environment. Then we interpret those feelings and physical sensations as certain emotions, like rage or guilt. How does this work?

  All brains evolved for the purposes of regulating the body. Any brain has to make decisions about what to invest its resources in: what am I going to spend, and what kind of reward am I going to get? Your brain is always regulating and it’s always predicting what the sensations from your body are to try to figure out how much energy to expend.

  When those sensations are very intense, we typically use emotion concepts to make sense of those sensory inputs. We construct emotions.

  Let’s back up a bit. What are emotion concepts?

  It’s just what you know about emotion — not necessarily what you can describe but what your brain knows to do and the feelings that come from that knowledge. When you’re driving, your brain knows how to do a bunch of things automatically, but you don’t need to articulate it or even be aware of it as you’re doing it to successfully drive.

  When you known an emotion concept, you can feel that emotion. In our culture we have “sadness,” in Tahitian culture they don’t have that. Instead they have a word whose closest translation would be “the kind of fatigue you feel when you have the flu.” It’s not the equivalent of sadness, that’s what they feel in situations where we would feel sad.

  Where do we learn those concepts?

  At the earliest stage, we are taught these concepts by our parents.

  You don’t have to teach children to have feelings. Babies can feel distress, they can feel pleasure and they do, they can certainly be aroused or calm. But emotion concepts — like sadness when something bad happens — are taught to children, not always explicitly. And that doesn’t stop in childhood either. Your brain has the capacity to combine past experience in novel ways to create new representations, experience something new that you’ve never seen or heard or felt before.

  I’m fascinated by the link between language and emotion. Are you saying that if we don’t have a word for an emotion, we can’t feel it?

  Here’s an example: you probably had experienced schadenfreude without knowing the word, but your brain would have to work really hard to construct those concepts and make those emotions. You would take a long time to describe it.

  But if you know the word, if you hear the word often, then it becomes much more automatic, just like driving a car. It gets triggered more easily and you can feel it more easily. And in fact that’s how schadenfreude feels to most Americans because they have a word they’ve used a lot. It can be conjured up very quickly.

  Does understanding that emotions are constructed help us control them?

  It’s never going to be the case that it’s effortless and never the case that you can snap your fingers and just change how you feel.

  But learning new emotions words is good because you can learn to feel more subtle emotions, and that makes you better at regulating your emotions. For example, you can learn to distinguish between distress and discomfort. This is partly why mindfulness meditation is so useful to people who have chronic pain — it lets you separate out the physical discomfort from the distress.

  I think understanding how emotions are constructed widens the horizon of control. You realize that if your brain is using your past to construct your present, you can invest energy in the present to cultivate new experiences that then become the seeds for your future. You can cultivate or curate experiences in the now and then they become, if you practice them, they become automated enough that your brain will automatically construct them in the future.

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• Wired - http://www.wired.co.uk/article/lisa-feldman-barrett-emotions

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  Q&A
  How emotions are 'made': why your definition of sadness is unlike anyone else's
  Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett is changing the way we think about our emotions

  By EMMA BRYCE
  Thursday 23 March 2017

  Ukususha / iStock
  Lisa Feldman Barrett says we need to revamp our thinking on emotions. She’s a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, where she applies psychology and neuroscience research to explore how emotions arise in the brain.

  Study: body mapping reveals emotions are felt in the same way across cultures

  Study: body mapping reveals emotions are felt in the same way across cultures
  Maps 02 Jan 2014

  In her new book, How Emotions are Made, she challenges the classical view, which holds that emotions are hard-wired into our brains and generated automatically by distinct regions, making them universally recognisable across all humans. Feldman Barrett argues instead for a more holistic view: the theory of constructed emotion, which she coined. With it, she explores the evidence that emotions are instead created spontaneously, by several brain regions in tandem, and shaped by factors like an individual’s previous experiences.

  She talks to WIRED about the logic behind this theory, how technology could make use of it, and calls attention to the unforeseen impacts that our emotional interactions will have on society as a whole.

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  WIRED: What does the classical view of emotion say?

  Lisa Feldman Barrett: It’s the idea that a small select set of emotions are universal to human nature. The classical view maintains that the brain comes pre-wired with neurons dedicated to a specific emotion, and that they’re triggered by something that happens in the world, going off like a little bomb. The neurons, once triggered, produce a fingerprint that identifies the emotion — like a specific facial expression that is universally recognised. But in every era of scientific study, there is evidence that doesn't match this view. When I observe other people and myself, I realise that I don't have one distinct sadness, for instance; I have an entire vocabulary of sadness. I don't have one happiness, one feeling of awe, or one feeling of gratitude; I have many. And they're each highly specific to the situation.

  What made you believe the classical view was flawed?

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  I came to the general conclusion that part of the problem is scientists begin with common sense categories [of emotion], and then they search for that distinctiveness in biology — in the brain, the body, genes. I think a better approach is to start with the structure of the brain and nervous system, and try to understand, what kind of emotions could a nervous system like this produce — and how would it do that?

  What does this reveal about how emotions are made?

  If you think about it from a brain's standpoint, it's trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull, and has no access to the causes of the sensations it receives. It only has the effects, and it has to figure out what caused them. So how does it do this? There’s one other thing it can use, and that’s past experience. The idea is that your brain is constantly predicting what sensory inputs to expect and what action to take, based on past experience. Then it uses the incoming input to either confirm its prediction, or change it. It works this way for vision, hearing, taste—for every sense. I think the way emotions are made is not special: your brain makes an emotion by using prior experiences of emotion to predict and explain incoming sensory inputs, and guide action.

  READ NEXT
  Researching the researchers: meet Stanford school's 'Cassandra' of fake news

  Researching the researchers: meet Stanford school's 'Cassandra' of fake news
  By EMMA BRYCE
  The WIRED guide to the brain in 2016

  The WIRED guide to the brain in 2016
  Neuroscience 28 Dec 2015
  Can you give an example?

  Say in the past you’ve experienced a variety of angers, each with its own neural pattern, pattern of bodily changes and movements. In the present situation, then, your brain has the capacity to make any of these angers, and each will fit the existing situation to some degree. Your brain contains selection mechanisms to help determine which anger fits the situation best.

  Do our more conventional, classical views on emotion have real-world implications?

  READ NEXT
  Lawrence Krauss on religion, science and our intellectual journey through the Universe

  Lawrence Krauss on religion, science and our intellectual journey through the Universe
  By DAVID WARMFLASH
  I just read that there are companies spending literally billions of dollars and millions of person hours developing technology that will read emotions off a face. I think that’s going to be a complete waste of time. You can definitely read facial movements — but the question is what those motions mean. If there's no one-to-one correspondence between an emotion and a set of facial movements, then unless you're capturing the context and what’s going on in the brain, you really can't know what a person is feeling.

  Could we use that technology better?

  Well, one thing we’ve never really been able to do is observe a person across multiple contexts over time. If I studied you over time, I’d learn about the vocabulary of your facial movements when you're angry, or happy, or sad. I’d learn how to predict your behaviour in context. Let’s say I could do that with 1,000 people: now that technology has made the data so easy I could discover what generalises across people, and what doesn't. This could be very powerful, if we take the big science and apply it to individuals.

  Are there links between your own theory and human health?

  My collaborators and I recently published a paper on superagers, people over the age of 65 whose memories work as well as a 25-year-old’s. It got a lot of press because it showed that the brain areas most important for superaging are those traditionally thought to be associated with emotion, rather than memory, per se. In fact, many of these brain regions are important for launching predictions. There’s some evidence that physical exercise, or learning something challenging like how to play a new instrument, will help to keep these predicting brain regions thick and healthy. So right now, we’re testing the hypothesis that challenging yourself now and then may help to keep you mentally sharp.

  Are you taking your research in any new directions?

  Yes. The theory I've introduced makes it clear that we’re a social species, which means we regulate each others' nervous systems. I can make your heart rate speed up or slow down, just by my choice of words. Something I have a particular interest in is that in the United States there's a problem with the casual brutality of social interactions. For example, in US schools bullying is accepted as a way of life. I believe it takes its toll in a really specific way. If you’re spending all your time in an environment that’s socially harsh, you don’t have the resources to take risks and fail academically—which is what we need to do to create an innovative and creative workforce. So I think we’re affecting brain development in a way that's going to impact society. The emotional climate of a culture is something we should be having serious conversations about: I would like to bring that dialogue to the public. I haven't quite figured out how, but I want to connect those ideas to the biology, to show why this is plausible.

  How Emotions are Made is published by Macmillan and is released on March 23.

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  The Making Of Emotions, From Pleasurable Fear To Bittersweet Relief
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  June 1, 20177:40 AM ET
  REBECCA HERSHER

  A psychologist argues people experience emotions differently. For instance, fear might make some people cry while for others, it could elicit laughter.
  Sara Wong for NPR
  Emotions, the classic thinking goes, are innate, basic parts of our humanity. We are born with them, and when things happen to us, our emotions wash over us.

  "They happen to us, almost," says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and a researcher at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

  She's also the author of a book called How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. In it, she argues for a new theory of emotions which is featured in the latest episode of NPR's program and podcast Invisibilia.

  The "classical view" of emotions as innate and limited in variety, she says, "matches the way that many of us experience emotion, as if something's happening outside of our control," she tells Shots.

  "But the problem with this set of ideas is that the data don't support them. There's a lot of evidence which challenges this view from every domain of science that's ever studied it."

  Lisa Feldman Barrett spoke to Shots about her alternative theory of emotions. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
  On the "classical" theory of emotions

  The classical view of emotion is the idea that somewhere lurking deep inside you are the animalistic engine parts of your brain. There are circuits — one each for anger, sadness, fear, disgust and so on. And that when something happens in the world to trigger one of those circuits — say, for fear — you will have a very specific facial expression, a very specific bodily response, and that these expressions and responses have universal meaning. Everyone in the world makes them and recognizes them without learning or any experience at all.

  On the wide variety of human emotions

  There's tremendous variability when it comes to emotion. Variety is the norm. It's not the case that there are there's one set of facial movements that you make when you're sad, or when you're angry, or when you're afraid. For example, people don't just scowl when they're angry or smile when they're happy. People smile when they're sad, they cry when they're angry, they scream when they're happy. A person can tremble in fear, jump in fear, freeze in fear, scream in fear, hide in fear, attack in fear, even laugh in the face of fear.

  So, I think that's one important observation that's really meaningful for understanding how emotions work in everyday life. That it may feel to you as if you look at someone's face and you just know how they feel. But in fact your brain is guessing, [and] it's using your own experiences from the past to make those guesses.

  On how the brain's predictive "guessing" can change how we think about emotions

  Your brain is organized in such a way as to [make] anticipatory guesses about what is going to happen next. And this is happening entirely outside of your awareness. You have past experiences, and those experiences become wired into your brain, and then your brain uses those past experiences to make guesses about the immediate future.

  So, emotions aren't happening to you. Your brain makes them as you need them. You are the architect of your own experience. It's just that most of this is happening outside of your awareness.

  On how much control people have over their emotions under Feldman Barrett's theory

  It's interesting. There are two ways in which I would say you are not a slave to your past. One is that your brain is able to take bits and pieces of past experience and combine them in new ways. Think of it like this: if you have a set of general ingredients in your kitchen, you can combine them in novel ways to make new recipes that you've never made before.

  Emotions

  Where do our emotions come from? Do they tell us truths about the world that should guide our behavior, or should we be more skeptical of them? Alix Spiegel and co-host Hanna Rosin examine how two people can look at the same thing and experience two different emotions in the first episode of Season 3 of the NPR podcast Invisibilia.
  The other way though is that we can invest effort in the present to cultivate new experiences for future use in prediction. This is a really nice discovery, because what it means is that your horizon of control over your own experience is much broader than you might think.

  For example, if you look at cognitive behavioral therapy, if you look at many of the books and articles which talk about cultivating compassion, cultivating wonder, cultivating a number of pleasant experiences that are thought to have beneficial effects, this is exactly what's happening. Your past experience is one ingredient to making emotions in the present.

  On how states of displeasure and arousal are related to emotions

  Those feelings are not properties of emotion, they're properties of consciousness because they're always with you, whether or not your brain is using them as ingredients of emotion, or for thoughts or perceptions. They are part of you and your experience of the world even when you are not experiencing emotions.

  For example you know that's a delicious drink. That guy's a [jerk]. You know this is a beautiful painting. These are these are examples of when affective feelings from your body are very strong, but you are not making emotions with them. You're making perceptions of the world or perceptions of another person.

  But when an affect is very intense, those are the moments when the brain is usually making emotion out of them. [For example], you can sometimes have a very strong feeling of fear when you're feeling very unpleasant and very worked up. But fear can also be pleasant. When you're on a roller coaster, for example. People pay money to be afraid.

  My point here is that in the classical view is that anger is negative — sometimes positive, but usually negative. Fear is negative, disgust is negative, happiness is positive.

  But what the evidence shows is, in fact, that the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an emotion is really variable. So there are varieties of sadness that can feel very pleasant, varieties of happiness that can feel very unpleasant. And the quality really comes from these sensations in your body.

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9/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Barrett, Lisa Feldman: HOW EMOTIONS ARE
MADE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Barrett, Lisa Feldman HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Nonfiction) $29.00 3, 7
ISBN: 978-0-544-13331-0
A well-argued, entertaining disputation of the prevailing view that emotion and reason are at odds.As Barrett
(Psychology/Northeastern Univ.; co-editor: The Psychological Construction of Emotion, 2014, etc.) writes, the
"internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilization. It helps define [us] as
human." From this perspective, emotion is treated as "a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality." To
the contrary, the author, who also has appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital,
contends that our emotions are not hard-wired in our brains and triggered by circumstances. Instead, they are flexible
and vary from culture to culture. During the course of our lifetimes, our brains wire and rewire themselves in response
to upbringing and individual experiences. This argument puts Barrett at odds with the prevailing review of wellregarded
scientists, such as Antonio Damasio, who emphasize that not only are our emotions shaped subconsciously,
but also many of our actions. The author makes a convincing case that such explanations are too simplistic. She
emphasizes that our brains respond flexibly to the circumstances of our lives. The degree to which we are responsible
for actions that occur in the heat of passion, or prejudices of which we are unaware, may be arguable; that we share
responsibility as parents and citizens for the social norms of our culture--e.g. racial prejudice and gender stereotyping--
is not. We are responsible for our individual actions, of course, but we also bear responsibility for working to eliminate
racial prejudice, gender stereotyping, and the like from our society. As Barrett points out, this has important legal as
well as moral implications and leads into the thorny questions surrounding free will. A highly informative, readable,
and wide-ranging discussion of "how psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines are moving away from the
search for emotion fingerprints and instead asking how emotions are constructed."
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Barrett, Lisa Feldman: HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234399&it=r&asid=d0a8fa82629a2443060b234860cb7ffc.
Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234399

---

9/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1505441126655 2/4
Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made:
The Secret Life of the Brain
Nancy H. Fontaine
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p120.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
* Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made; The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Harcourt. Mar. 2017.448p.
illus. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780544133310. $29; ebk. ISBN 9780544129962. SCI
Barrett (psychology, Northeastern Univ.) presents a new neuroscientific explanation of why people are more swayed by
feelings than by facts. She offers an unintuitive theory that goes against not only the popular understanding but also that
of traditional research: emotions don't arise; rather, we construct them on the fly. Fur thermore, emotions are neither
universal nor located in specific brain regions; they vary by culture and result from dynamic neuronal networks. These
networks run nonstop simulations, making predictions and correcting them based on the environment rather than
reacting to it. Tracing her own journey from the classical view of emotions, Barrett progressively builds her case,
writing in a conversational tone and using down-to-earth metaphors, relegating the heaviest neuroscience to an
appendix to keep the book accessible. Still, it is a lot to take in if one has not been exposed to these ideas before.
VERDICT The theories of emotion and the human brain set forth here are revolutionary and have important
implications. For readers interested in psychology and neuroscience as well as those involved in education and policy.--
Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Fontaine, Nancy H. "Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain." Library Journal,
1 Jan. 2017, p. 120+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562435&it=r&asid=d96ad8eb19efb4168706f6468286e34b.
Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562435

---

9/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1505441126655 3/4
Briefly Noted
Eliza Grace Crichton Martin
The New Yorker.
93.11 (May 1, 2017): p69.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast
Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text: 
Briefly Noted
How Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Drawing on neuroscience and
experimental psychology to overturn the assumption that emotions are innate and universal, this book describes them as
"goal-based concepts" designed to help us categorize experience. Emotions, Barrett writes, are learned and shaped by
culture, so "variation is the norm": "Russian has two distinct concepts for what Americans call 'Anger.' German has
three distinct 'Angers' and Mandarin has five." Upbringing has the biggest influence, but we can all reshape our mental
makeup and learn new concepts. The latter part of the book considers how doing so can affect our health, the law, and
our relationship to the natural world. As Barrett frequently repeats, "You are an architect of your experience."
City of Light, City of Poison, by Holly Tucker (Norton). In 1667, Louis XIV, hoping to reduce crime in Paris, created a
law-enforcement position-the lieutenant general of police-with sweeping powers of surveillance and detention. Tucker's
history focusses on the first incumbent, Nicolas de la Reynie, who built up a network of informants and discovered
more than he'd bargained for: an underground world of poisoners, witches, and chiromancers who were linked to a rash
of deaths at Versailles and were plotting against the King. Working from la Reynie's extensive notes and reports, Tucker
blends an artful reconstruction of seventeenth-century Paris with riveting storytelling, presenting a contest between
terror and surveillance that has strong contemporary resonances.
The Shadow Land, by Elizabeth Kostova (Ballantine). When Alexandra, a young American writer living in Sofia,
happens upon an urn of cremated remains, her search to learn about the deceased and to find his family engenders an
exploration of Bulgaria's fraught history from the Second World War to the present. The novel is both a coming-of-age
story and a thriller-Alexandra and a taxi-driving, poetry-writing ex-detective soon find themselves in danger-and the
attempt to unite various plot and stylistic strands leaves the protagonist's character amorphous. The book is strongest
when the story of the dead man, a violinist who was a tragic victim of the communist era, takes over.
The Woman on the Stairs, by Bernhard Schlink, translated from the German by Joyce Hackett and Bradley Schmidt
(Pantheon). At the heart of this terse novel is a love rectangle, decades in the past: a businessman commissioned a
portrait of his wife, Irene; she left him for the artist; the narrator, a lawyer called in to settle a dispute over the painting,
fell for Irene, too; then both she and the painting disappeared. Forty years later, a chance glimpse of the picture in a
gallery on the other side of the world leads to a series of reunions and examinations of male possessiveness. Tellingly, it
is Irene's story that saves things from lapsing into aimless retrospect. Rejecting the roles of trophy, muse, and damsel in
distress, she refuses to accept that a woman "belongs in the hands of some man."
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Martin, Eliza Grace Crichton. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 1 May 2017, p. 69. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491048887&it=r&asid=72e7bcfb7739c2f3a8c394ff0cb752c3.
Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491048887

---

9/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the
Brain
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p136.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
Lisa Feldman Barrett. Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, $29 (448p) ISBN 978-0-544-13331-0
Psychologist and neuroscientist Barrett painstakingly attempts to refute traditional thinking about human emotions as
portrayed in the popular media, such as the TV show Lie To Me and Oscar-winning movie Inside Out. She argues that
emotions aren't a "fixed component of our biological nature," but rather are constructed in our minds based on
predictions. Emotions take form from how they are perceived, Barrett writes, and moreover, they take different forms
in different cultures. Her ideas make intuitive sense and are convincing, though her presentation is often slow going as
she painstakingly dissects every conceivable counterargument. Some of her ideas are, as she admits, speculative,
though "informed by data." The book includes possible implications of constructed emotions, Barrett's prescriptions for
emotional health--"eating healthfully, exercising, and getting enough sleep," among others--and an investigation into
whether animals experience emotions. Most startling is Barrett's suggestion that chronic pain, stress, anxiety, and
autism might be caused by errors in predicted, constructed emotions. The book is a challenging read and will offer the
most rewards to researchers already familiar with the longstanding and apparently still unresolved arguments about
what emotions are. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 136. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225093&it=r&asid=ba86d170eec12867c1025a16590e8125.
Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225093

"Barrett, Lisa Feldman: HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234399&it=r. Accessed 14 Sept. 2017. Fontaine, Nancy H. "Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 120+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562435&it=r. Accessed 14 Sept. 2017. Martin, Eliza Grace Crichton. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 1 May 2017, p. 69. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491048887&it=r. Accessed 14 Sept. 2017. "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 136. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225093&it=r. Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.

• The Globe and Mail
  https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/lisa-feldman-barretts-how-emotions-are-made-reviewed-a-provocative-theory-that-falls-flat/article34516679/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&
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  REVIEW
  Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, reviewed: Provocative theory falls flat

  Open this photo in gallery: Studio Eleven
  Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made argues that our common conception of emotions is false.

  MARK KARLSBERG/STUDIO ELEVEN
  JAY HOSKING
  SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
  APRIL 15, 2017
  MARCH 31, 2017
  TITLE How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain AUTHOR Lisa Feldman Barrett GENRE Non-fiction PUBLISHER Houghton Mifflin Harcourt PAGES 425 PRICE $40
  Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made is not a good pop science book. Good pop science books challenge the reader with new ideas that are both convincing and useful, all the while maintaining their interest – a page-turner that makes you smarter. While Barrett's book does present a provocative theory, much of it is vague and unnecessary, much like its subtitle (The Secret Life of the Brain), and large swaths of the text don't further the author's argument.

  It is admittedly a bold argument, and Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, puts it forward without hesitation: Our common conception of emotions is false. Happiness, sadness, anger and the rest are not represented by specific circuits within the brain but are rather constructed in each particular instance. Decades of research is predicated on the idea that the brain contains distinct pathways for each emotion, that these emotions are conserved by evolution (and thus seen in our furry friends), and that they manifest as distinct facial expressions that are often labelled "primary" emotions. Barrett effectively and unceremoniously exposes the methodological weaknesses in this research and puts forward an alternative hypothesis; namely, that there is no separating emotion from cognition in the brain, and that there are innumerable neural combinations to generate each instance of emotion.

  Her criticisms are valid and, in some respects, her alternative makes sense: anger, after all, can manifest as both lashing out violently or smiling while plotting another's misfortune. But in getting to her conclusions, she constructs a dubious straw man, which she dubs the "classical view of emotion." According to Barrett, the establishment's classical view espouses that each emotion has a distinct physiological state (heart rate, sweating, etc.), that dogs and flies alike can feel terror, that emotions are objectively real in the sense that raindrops or flowers are real, and so on. Even first-year psychology undergraduates would recognize this so-called classical view as farcical and contrary to the best available evidence, and this leaves Barrett looking like she's fighting an opponent who doesn't exist.

  As for her alternative, she relies on modern neuroscientific evidence to build a theory of how emotions are generated. Barrett demonstrates the powerful effect of "top-down" processes on our perception: if told there is a spider crawling under our clothes, for example, we are suddenly aware of every brush and itch against our skin; or if shown a shape, say "6," we can quickly read it as a number or a letter given the circumstances ("416" versus "Glo6e and Mail"). In other words, Barrett argues we construct simulations of the world and then compare our perceptions against them, a theory that a variety of brain and mind disciplines agrees with. How this relates to emotions is less clear in her argument, as is why emotions should subjectively feel different than other types of simulations we have.

  A third of the book is devoted to breaking down her theories into maddeningly imprecise terms, such as "body budgeting" and "concept cascades," that are neither superficial enough for the lay reader, nor deep enough for the science reader. It's slow reading. And in the process she evokes the concept of "affect," a word often synonymous with "emotion" in research, but here she defines it instead by how arousing and how positively or negatively valenced a situation is.

  Which leads us back to our furry friends. Our dogs, Barrett argues, have all the hallmarks of affect, with their wagging tails or bared teeth or yips when injured, but are most likely incapable of emotion because they don't have language. They demonstrate a variety of behaviours and internal states that appear consistent and appropriate to emotion, but theirs is a lesser form relegated to affect. This of course raises the question: then what exactly does Barrett mean when she says "emotion," if not the affect or relevant behaviours and physiological states?

  Ultimately, How Emotions Are Made is a book about how humans subjectively experience emotion, not about the full repertoire of what makes an emotion. Barrett contends that most experienced emotion requires language, but the proposition that we don't all experience anger without having the accompanying word "anger" is troublesome. Worse still, it tells us nothing about what emotions are for, their connection to value (in terms of both brain regions and behaviour), and why emotions feel different than other thoughts if they are in fact just another form of cognition. The criticisms Barrett levels may be excellent, and her theory may be a better model than the status quo, but too often the answers in How Emotions Are Made are dissatisfying, vague or entirely absent. Instead you get whole chapters on emotion and the law, or how diet, exercise and sleep are important. It doesn't make for good pop science.

  Jay Hosking has a PhD in neuroscience and is author of the novel Three Years with the Rat.

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