How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Barrett argues against the long-dominant "classical view" of emotion, which holds that distinct emotions like fear or anger have specific, universal facial expressions and neural fingerprints that fire automatically in response to triggering events. Drawing on her own neuroscience research and a broad review of the field, she proposes instead that the brain is constantly predicting and constructing experience, including emotional experience, by combining raw internal body sensations (interoception) with concepts learned through culture and language, meaning the same physical event can be constructed as a completely different emotion depending on context and prior learning.

It matters because this theory of constructed emotion has significant practical implications: if emotions are built rather than triggered, people have more capacity to influence their own emotional experience by changing the concepts and context they bring to a given bodily state, with consequences for mental health treatment, workplace practices, the justice system's reliance on reading emotion from faces, and how we raise children.

Who should read it

Readers interested in neuroscience, psychology, or the science of emotion who want a rigorous but accessible challenge to popular assumptions about feelings will find this essential. It also matters for professionals in law, education, or mental health whose work assumes emotions can be reliably read from facial expressions.

About the author

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University, with additional research appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, known for her research on the neuroscience and psychological construction of emotion.