January 15, 2021
We launch our second season featuring a conversation with psychologist, neuroscientist, and emotion researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett. She and Wendy discuss a broad range of topics about the mind, including:
- her unexpected path into studying emotions;
- how our brains construct and predict our reality;
- the brain’s essential role in regulating the body;
- emotions as interpretations of our bodily state;
- how our past shapes and filters our present experience;
- the difference between affective feelings (mood) and emotions;
- our capacity to influence our own emotions;
- deconstructing our experience through mindfulness;
- how to improve our emotional lives;
- connections with Buddhist theories of mind;
- implications for our understanding of the self;
- how we regulate not only our own, but others’ nervous systems;
- and how stress and modernity might lead to clinging to entrenched views.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASLab) at Northeastern University. She holds research appointments in the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Program in the Department of Psychiatry and at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on how the human brain, in continual conversation with the human body and the world, create a human mind. She is the author of How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. In addition, she has published over 240 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals. Lisa is among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience.
Resources
Website: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/
Twitter: @LFeldmanBarrett
- Book: How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)
- Book: Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020)
- Paper: The Power of Predictions: An Emerging Paradigm for Psychological Research (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2020)
- Cinematic lecture on emotion (2020, 40 min)
- TED Talk: You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions (2018)
- Electrical towers jumping rope
View or download a transcript of this episode