BOSTON–Emotions aren’t hardwired—your brain creates them. Northeastern psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has studied emotions—what they are, where they come from, and how they are created—for more than two decades.
In her new TED Talk, Prof. Barrett explains that emotions are not universally expressed and recognized, and that we have more control over our emotions than we might think. To watch the TED video, please click here.
“Can you look at someone’s face and know what they’re feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway?” ask TED editors in introducing the video on the TED website.
For the past 25 years, psychology Prof. Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physiology studies to understand what emotions really are. She shares the results of her exhaustive research — and explains how we may have more control over our emotions than we think.
Prof. Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASLab) at Northeastern University, with research appointments in the departments of psychiatry and radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed research papers in top scientific journals on emotion, psychology, and neuroscience.
She educates the public about science with her articles for the New York Times and other media outlets. Her research teams span the globe, studying people in the West, the East and remote parts of Africa.
(Printed with permission from News at Northeastern and some information taken from TED.)
