Featured
Barrett, a Northeastern University distinguished professor of psychology, has received the Association for Psychological Science William James Fellow Award.
Northeastern University distinguished professor of psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett says that she first encountered psychology, in an academic context, when she “needed to pick up another science course to replace physics” in her undergraduate education.
At the time, as a student at the University of Toronto, Barrett was aiming to become a medical doctor.
“I was originally assuming that I was going to be pre-med,” she says. “I honestly had no idea what psychology was.”
Forty years later, Barrett — who specializes in the study of emotions — has been honored with the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), which recognizes a lifetime of achievement in that field.
“I was a first-generation college student, and I came from a background of very limited means,” Barrett says.
Thanks to lower tuitions in Canada at the time, Barrett was able to put herself through school by working sometimes three jobs at once, and by cutting costs where she could.
“I lived at home, and I commuted an hour each way for most of the time I was an undergraduate,” she says.
Barrett may have battled with her physics course, but she also discovered a real joy for other scholarly topics through her psychology, physiology and anthropology courses, and even a history of science class. Taking those courses, she says, “turned out to be prescient.”
“The history of physics in particular has become foundational to the work that I’m now doing in the philosophy of science, and in the history of psychology and science more generally.”
Some of the questions that concerned her then would continue to inform her later work. “Linguistic relativity theory is an example,” she says. “The idea that the language that you speak, the words that you know and the concepts that you have learned in your culture shape your thought.”
Barrett’s final turn away from pre-med and toward psychology came while doing her senior honors thesis with a psychology professor who only agreed to write her a letter of recommendation for medical school if she also agreed to apply to a graduate school for psychology.
“So I applied to two,” she says.
“Long story short,” Barrett continues, over the course of her senior year, “I realized I didn’t really want to go to medical school.”
At each turn in her early career, Barrett found mentors who encouraged her beyond what she believed were her limits, she says, from the professor who convinced her to apply to a psychology program to the adviser for her Ph.D. dissertation.
Barrett notes that her original plan was to become a full-time therapist after completing her Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Her adviser, however — along with the rest of her dissertation committee — rejected her first dissertation proposal.
“I was in shock,” she says. “And then my adviser, just off the cuff, said ‘Yeah, we failed you because this wouldn’t make a very good job talk.’”
This one remark changed the course of Barrett’s career, she says. “I thought, ‘A job talk? Oh… he thinks I can actually be a professor.’”
The adviser’s faith “really invigorated me,” Barrett says, and she turned her “attention to focus more on building the foundation for a career in scientific research.”
After selecting a new project for her dissertation, “things just took off from there.”
As a professor now herself, Barrett takes her mentorship responsibilities seriously.
“When you’re advising a student, you’re really an adviser for the whole person,” she says. “Also, when I mentor graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, I support them until they’re full professors,” a process that can take a decade or more.
With the APS William James award, Barrett has now received what are arguably the two most prestigious awards in psychology — she was recognized with the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award in 2021. Both awards, she wrote in a follow-up, “really belong to the entire community of mentees, scientists and other scholars who I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with.”
The award that’s meant the most to her, she says, was the APS Mentor Award, which she received in 2018.
“I think the nomination letter,” which contained statements of nomination from former students and mentees, “was something like 40 pages long,” she says.
“That’s the most important award I’ve ever received.”
Which isn’t to say that Barrett isn’t honored — and surprised — to receive the William James award.
“I’m in the process of writing papers about how psychological science should pay more attention to its history,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve been writing critically about the hidden philosophy of science in psychology,” so this major award really came out of left field.
“I’m delighted,” she says, “but I was surprised. It was a very welcome surprise, of course.”
Even as she’s receiving the field’s most prestigious recognitions, she’s encouraging that field to be more self-critical. “Progress in science isn’t solving questions, it’s asking better questions,” Barrett says. “Scientists have a worldview, and when they don’t acknowledge they have one, and they think that they’re just data driven, that’s very dangerous.”
Ironically, some of Barrett’s most recent scholarly work focuses on the writings of William James — the 19th-century thinker sometimes called “the father of American psychology,” whom the award is named after — and how those writings have been misunderstood for more than a century, she says.
This sometimes leads to disagreements with the “luminaries” in psychology, she continues.
“It can feel uncomfortable and even a bit scary to question the experts in your field,” Barrett says. “But in science, authority is not evidence of justified knowledge.”
“I have a healthy questioning of authority.”
“You can’t take other people’s word for it,” she says. “You really have to learn enough about a field to make your own judgments.”
Barrett received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology over 30 years ago, and since then she’s “retrained in social psychology, psychophysiology, cognitive science and neuroscience, and now, most recently, in philosophy and history of science,” she wrote.
“It’s like I did a Ph.D. every couple of years, learning a new field with the help of very generous, very patient colleagues,” Barrett says.
“It’s fascinating, really. The debates that are happening in the science of emotion right now have already happened,” she says. “At least once, and maybe twice in the past. History is repeating itself because scientists and other scholars remain unaware of that history.
Barrett hopes that her more recent forays into philosophy and history can help fellow psychologists and neuroscientists reevaluate their own research and contributions within the field.
Barrett describes Northeastern as one of the best places for her to “conduct transdisciplinary research,” which she says “integrates tools and evidence from a range of scientific disciplines beyond psychology, from biochemistry and developmental neurobiology to anthropology and linguistics, with conceptual tools from philosophy and history.
“The resulting hypotheses extend beyond the boundaries of any single discipline to create more trustworthy, robust scientific knowledge.”
“For many years, Karen Quigley, who is a psychophysiologist, and I, with expertise in neuroscience, co-directed a laboratory,” Barrett says, referring to their Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASLab). How many science laboratories, she asks, “are co-directed, first of all, and by two women?”
The IASLab recently added a third director, an expert in brain metabolism and its relation to the mind.
“Northeastern has an entrepreneurial spirit with enough flexibility to try new things. That’s one of the reasons I came here,” she notes.
“The hypotheses that we’ve developed and the knowledge that we’ve produced transcend the silos of any given field, and there aren’t a lot of places that will let you do that.”
Barrett will accept the 2025 William James Fellow Award at the APS annual convention in Washington, D.C., in May.