Lisa Feldman Barrett – Emotions: Facts vs. Fictions

The 2019 Rotman Lecture will be delivered by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University, and author of “How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain“. She delivered the 2017 TED Talk, “You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them”, which was among the top 25 most watched TED videos of 2018.

In this talk, we’ll explore a series of experiments about emotion whose conclusions seem to defy common sense. We’ll learn that common sense is wrong, and has been for 2000 years. In the process, we’ll dispel four of the most widespread fictions about emotions that lurk in classrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms around the world. We’ll then explore a radically new scientific understanding of what emotions are and how they work.

SPEAKER PROFILE Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University. Dr. Barrett’s research focuses on the nature of emotion from the perspectives of both psychology and neuroscience, and takes inspiration from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. Her lab takes an interdisciplinary approach, and incorporates methods from social, clinical, and personality psychology, psychophysiology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, and visual cognition. Current projects focus on understanding the psychological construction of emotion (i.e., how basic affective and conceptual ingredients provide the recipes for emotional experiences), age- and disease-related changes in affective circuitry within the human brain, how language and context influence emotion perception, how affect influences vision, and sex differences in emotion. 

This Rotman Lecture is co-sponsored by the London Public Library and The Brain and Mind Institute at Western University. Attendance is free, but for planning purposes advance registration is requested. Registration for this event will be opened on February 14, 2019.