Biography
Lisa Feldman Barrett is an American psychologist and neuroscientist, and a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also maintains academic and research affiliations with Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research examines emotions, perception, and the ways in which the brain constructs meaning through bodily and contextual processes.
She is a leading proponent of the theory of constructed emotion, which challenges the view of emotions as universal states defined by fixed neural circuits. In How Emotions Are Made (2017), she explained how concepts, prediction and bodily regulation contribute to emotional experience. In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020), she introduced key questions concerning brain organisation and human behaviour.
Her scientific work brings together experimental psychology, affective neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Her research has contributed to debates on the relationship between brain, body, culture and subjective experience, as well as to a critical reassessment of certain widely held assumptions about emotions.
Profiles and references
Published books