Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: How to Understand Emotions

In this episode, my guest is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University who is a world expert in the science of emotions. She explains what emotions are and how the brain represents and integrates signals from our body and the environment around us to create our unique emotional states. We discuss the relationship between emotions and language, how our specificity of language impacts our emotional processing, the role of facial expressions in emotions, and how emotions relate to sleep, movement, nutrition and the building and reinforcement of social bonds. We also discuss actionable tools for how to regulate feelings of uncertainty and tools to better understand the emotional states of others. This episode ought to be of interest to anyone curious about the neuroscience and psychology underlying emotions and for those who seek to better understand themselves and relate to others and the world in richer, more adaptive ways.

Articles

• Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements (Psychological Science in the Public Interest)

Books

• "Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution"
• "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma"
• "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us"
• "I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life"

Other Resources

• Dr. Karl Deisseroth: Understanding & Healing the Mind (Huberman Lab episode)
• Counterintuitive Ideas About How the Brain Work (Lex Fridman Podcast)
• Love, Evolution, and the Human Brain (Lex Fridman Podcast):