Lisa Feldman Barrett

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on affective science.

She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory.

Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review.

Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science.

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.

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, 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.

The resulting research direction became her life's work: understanding the nature of emotion in the brain.

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.

Barrett is most inspired by William James, Wilhelm Wundt, and Charles Darwin.

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:

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."

In 2010, she joined the psychology faculty at Northeastern University.

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.

At the beginning of her career, Barrett's research focused on the structure of affect, having developed experience-sampling methods 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.

From 2018–2021, she was ranked in the top one percent of the most-cited scientists in the world over a ten-year period.

In 2019–2020, she served as president of the Association for Psychological Science.