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Institution
Boston CollegeCurrent Position
Professor Highest Degree
Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from University of Waterloo, 1992
Research Interests
 | Emotion |
| Gender |
| Personality |
| Research Methods/Assessment |
Laboratory Home Page
Courses Taught
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Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion |
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Emotion Proseminar |
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The Social Psychology of Emotion |
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Lisa Feldman Barrett
Department of Psychology
427 McGuinn Building
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467-3807
U.S.A.
Home Page
Phone: (617) 552-1541
Fax: (617) 552-0523
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As a graduate student training in clinical psychology, I noticed something interesting when dealing with clients: people used the words “anger,” “sadness,” and “fear” interchangeably, as if they could not tell these emotional states apart. This observation was the basis for a decade-long research project where I examined the structure of emotion experience on a person-by-person (or idiographic) basis. Each of over 700 participants tracked their experiences for about a month during the course of everyday life using a then novel procedure called computerized experience-sampling. I developed software and statistical procedures to capture and model the data, and in so doing made a startling discovery: Although everyone largely assumes that “anger,” “sadness,” and “fear” are discrete, distinguishable events, people vary a great deal in emotional granularity, or the extent to which they represent their experiences in distinctive categorical terms. Some individuals use these words to refer to distinct experiences, whereas others use exactly the same words to represent their feelings in more basic affective terms (that is, they use the same words for what they have in common, which is unpleasant feeling). The practical implication of discovering emotional granularity was clear: It is not sufficient to rely solely on measures of single emotion category (e.g., anxiety) because people may be using those items to communicate a broader affective experience. Measures of multiple categories must always be used to establish the meaning of self-reports of emotion experience. Moreover, individuals with greater granularity appear to be more emotionally intelligent in a number of important ways. The theoretical implications of this discovery were far reaching: Either granular individuals are more accurate in representing their internal states (if emotions are natural kinds to be detected), or anger, sadness, fear, and so on are not the basic building blocks of emotional life as is currently assumed in the scientific literature on emotion. This dilemma led me to a broad review of the scientific literature to determine if it was possible to derive a material, perceiver-independent definition of anger, sadness, fear, and several other emotions, to assess the accuracy question. What I found was surpising: There are no consistent and coherent sets of measures that can definitively index when a person is angry, or sad, or afraid (and so on). Objective measures of the face, voice, body, and (thus far) the human brain, as well as more subjective measures of experience, indicate whether a person is in a positive or a negative state, but do not clearly indicate whether the person is angry, sad, afraid, and so on. My comprehensive review of the literature indicated that the most popular models of emotion, which I collectively refer to as “Natural Kind Models,” cannot adequately account for the existing data. Furthermore, the Natural Kind View leads people to reify the existence of emotional “essences” so that scientists ignore the true and extensive variability in emotional responding within any given species (as well as across species). This state of affairs led me to formulate the Conceptual Act Model of Emotion. The Conceptual Act Model is a consilient approach to emotion. It integrates ideas and findings from the philosophy of science, the philosophy of consciousness, behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, various subdisciplines of psychology, psychophysiology, and anthropology. It starts with the basic distinction between pleasant and unpleasant states that are undeniably coded by the mammalian nervous system. What differs across species is how this basic distinction is modified or elaborated by an organism. In humans, this distinction is further shaped by a conceptual system for emotion (i.e., in the US, knowledge about emotions corresponding to the English words “anger,” “sadness,” “fear,” and so on). The evolutionary legacy to the newborn is not a set of modular emotion circuits that are hardwired into the brain, but rather a set of mechanisms that compute core affect, as well as those that allow category learning and categorization. The content (i.e., what is coded as a threat or reward, pleasant or unpleasant; which categories are acquired and the content that instantiates them) is largely learned, scaffolded onto a much smaller set of biologically given information. According to the Conceptual Act Model, the colloquial idea of “having an emotion” occurs when people categorize the ebb and flow of core affect as emotion. Emotions are not illusions. They are not processes. They are mental contents. What we call anger are instances where affect has been categorized using conceptual knowledge for anger (whether we are categorizing our own affect state or that of another organism). Categorizing affect bounds it as a discrete experience – allows it to pop out in consciousness – and gives it meaning – it transforms core affect into an intentional state, allows us to make inferences about what caused the affective change, what to do next, and allows us to communicate about affect in an effective and efficient manner. From this perspective, the scientific laws of emotion, that is, the general (nomothetic) laws that characterize all humans, may be laws of process, rather than content. Meaning, it may the conceptual and affective processes themselves, rather than the contents that they produce (in the form of anger, sadness, and fear) that form the basic truths about what emotions are and how they work. My research currently focuses on the nature of core affect and conceptual processing as they relate to emotion. My research on core affect is currently funded by NIA R01 AG030311 and NSF BCS 0527440. My work on the role of conceptual processing in emotion has been recommended for funding at the NSF. I also just completed an Independent Scientist Research (K02) Award from the NIMH.
 Books:
 Barrett, L. F., Niedenthal, P., & Winkielman, P. (Eds.). (2005). Emotion and consciousness. New York: Guilford.
- Barrett, L. F., & Salovey, P. (Eds.). (2002). The wisdom in feeling: Processes underlying emotional intelligence. New York: Guilford.
Journal Articles:
- 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. (2006). Valence as a basic building block of emotional life. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 35-55.
- Barrett, L. F. (2004). Feelings or words? Understanding the content in self-report ratings of emotional experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 266-281.
- Barrett, L. F., Bliss-Moreau, E., Duncan, S. L., Rauch, S.L., & Wright, C. I. (2007). The amygdala and the experience of affect. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 2, 73-83.
- Barrett, L. F., Lindquist, K., Bliss-Moreau, E., Duncan, S., Gendron, M., Mize, J., & Brennan, L. (in press). Of mice and men: Natural kinds of emotion in the mammalian brain? Perspectives on Psychological Science.
- Barrett, L. F., Lindquist, K., & Gendron, M. (in press). Language as a context for emotion perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
- Barrett, L. F., Mesquita, B., Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2007). The experience of emotion. Annual Review of Psychology,58, 373-403.
- Barrett, L. F., & Russell, J. A. (1999). Structure of current affect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 10-14.
- Barrett, L. F., Tugade, M. M., & Engle, R. W. (2004). Individual differences in working memory capacity and dual-process theories of the mind. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 553-573.
- Barrett, L.F., & Wager, T.D. (2006). The structure of emotion: Evidence from the neuroimaging of emotion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 79-85.
- Duncan, S., & Barrett, L.F. (in press). Affect as a form of cognition: A neurobiological analysis. Cognition and Emotion.
- Lindquist, K., Barrett, L. F., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Russell, J. A. (2006). Language and the perception of emotion. Emotion, 6, 125-138.
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