Lisa Feldman Barrett

How a particular brain assigns meaning has to do with a person’s prior experiences—what Lisa Feldman Barrett, the director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University and the author of How Emotions Are Made, calls its “concepts and categories.”

As Northeastern University psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has explained, our emotions aren’t just experiences that bubble up involuntarily in our minds or bodies.

Research by Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and others shows that the more precise language we have for our feelings, the better we are at understanding and coping with difficult emotions. More vocabulary can lead to more EQ.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Northeastern University, is one of the world’s foremost experts on the science of emotions.

“Sure, [a sustained signal] happens in emotion,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University. “But it also happens in all kinds of other instances,” like when a person is concentrating or remembering.

Mentions insights from psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University on how our brain interprets emotion.

“It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you: that they bubble up and that they cause you to do and say things that are maybe ill-advised. But that explanation doesn’t really capture how your brain is making emotions,” explained Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett on Big Think. 

Neuroscientist and Northeastern University Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett speaks specifically about embarrassment in her book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Mariner Books, 2018).