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Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D. (Waterloo), is a professor in the department of Psychology at Boston College^[1], where she focuses on the study of emotion. She is director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory and is co-director of the Laboratory of Aging and Emotion at Massachusetts General Hospital. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review^[2].

Born in Toronto, Canada in 1963, Barrett obtained her Bachelor of Science in Psychology with Honors at the University of Toronto. From there she went on to complete her graduate training in Clinical Psychology at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada. She completed her Clinical Internship at the University of Manitoba Medical School. It was during her graduate training that Barrett developed her current hypothesis on emotion, the Conceptual-act model of emotion, a novel psychological constructionist approach.

Honors and awards

Elected Fellow, American American Association for the Advancement of Science^[3] American Association for the Advancement of Science." 2008

Kavli Fellow in the Frontiers of Science Program^[4], National Academy of Sciences, Frontiers of Science 2008

NIH Director's Pioneer Award 2007-2012 ^[5].

Career Trajectory Award, Society for Experimental Social Psychology 2006 ^[6]

Elected Fellow, American Psychological Association, 2005

Elected Fellow, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2005.

Elected fellow, Association for Psychological Science,^[7] 2003

Independent Scientist Research (K02) Award, NIMH 2002-2007

Professional History

At the beginning of her career, Dr. Barrett's research focused on the structure of affect, having developed experience-sampling methods^[8] and software to study emotional experience. Dr. Barrett and members at IASL now taking a broader approach, studying the nature of emotion from social-psychological, psychophysiological, cognitive science, and neuroscience perspectives, and takes inspiration from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. They are also starting to explore the role of emotion in other psychological phenomena, like vision.

Emotion Views

Previous views on emotion take the Natural Kinds approach, assuming that a stimulus evokes a discrete causal mechanism in the brain and body that produces a unique, response signature that can be readily recognzed by others. In this perspective, emotions are innate, and all people are born having 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, conceptualization (or categorization), and executive attention. These psychological ingredients combine to create “emotions.” A central hypothesis of the Conceptual Act Model is that affect, conceptualization, and executive attention are general ingredients of the mind, and are also important in creating “memories,” “thoughts,” “beliefs,” “perceptions,” “attitudes,” “the self,” and so on.

Core Affect

Core Affect is an omnipresent, neurophysiological state described with two properties (hedonic valence (psychology) and arousal); can be consciously accessed.

Conceptualization

Conceptualization, or categorization is 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

Executive attention is 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.

Publications

All of Dr. Barrett’s publications (as well as those from her lab) can be found here.

Publications of particular importance include:

• 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.
• 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

• Boston College Faculty Page [1]
• Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory Page [2]
• Curriculum Vitae [3]
• Official site
• Publications
• ESP (Experience Sampling Program): free, open-source software for scientists

References

1. ^ Boston College faculty profile
2. ^ Emotion Review
3. ^ American Association for the Advancement of Science
4. ^ Kavli Frontiers of Science
5. ^ Pioneer award announcement
6. ^ 2006 Career Trajectory Award
7. ^ Fellow status in APS
8. ^ Hektner, Joel M.; Jennifer A. Schmidt, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2006). Experience Sampling Method: Measuring the Quality of Everyday Life.. SAGE Publications. p. 37 et al.. ISBN 1-4129-4923-8.