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Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and noted researcher on human emotion. She is best known for her research on the structure of affect, her use of experience-sampling methods to study emotional experience, and most recently her theory of how emotions are generated in the brain and represented in the mind.
Dr. Barrett, born 1963 in Toronto, Canada, is professor in the department of Psychology at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts, and holds an interdisciplinary position in affective science. She is also an Assistant in Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her research includes perspectives from clinical psychology, psychophysiology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience.
The Conceptual-Act Model of Emotion
Most theories of emotion assume that emotions are genetically endowed, not learned, and are produced by dedicated circuits in the brain: an anger circuit, a fear circuit, and so on. In contrast, Barrett's research suggests that these emotions (often called basic emotions) are not biologically hardwired, but instead emerge "in the moment" from two more fundamental entities: core affect and categorization.
Core affect is a neurophysiological state characterized along two dimensions:
- Pleasure vs. displeasure, measured along a continuous scale from positive to negative.
- High arousal vs. low arousal, measured along a continuous scale between these endpoints.
According to this theory, emotion is generated when a person categorizes his/her core affective state using knowledge about emotion. This theory combines elements of linguistic relativity and the neuroscience of affective processing in the mammalian brain.
Barrett's theory is analogous to how humans experience color. People experience colors as discrete categories: blue, red, yellow, and so on. The physics of color is actually continuous, however, with wavelengths measured in nanometers along a scale from ultraviolet to infrared. When a person experiences an object as "blue," she is using her knowledge of color to give this wavelength a label. And in fact, people experience a whole range of wavelengths as "blue." Likewise, emotions are commonly thought of as discrete and distinct -- fear, anger, happiness -- while core affect is continuous. Barrett's theory says that at a given moment, people categorize and apply a label to their level of affect (or affective state), using their knowledge of emotions, just as they experience and label colors. This process corresponds to "having an emotion." For example, if someone is experiencing negative affect, and sees a snake, she would categorize (and experience) her affective state as "fear," in essence generating an instance of fear. In contrast, a "basic emotions" researcher would say that seeing the snake triggers a dedicated "fear circuit" in the brain.
See also
External links
"Lisa Feldman Barrett"