Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett

Feldman Barrett is a psychologist at Northeastern University whose research argues that emotions are not universal biological reactions waiting to be set off, but constructions the brain assembles out of bodily signals and learned concepts, which would mean there is no fingerprint for anger to go looking for. How Emotions Are Made lays out that theory and its evidence. This is a live dispute rather than a settled result: researchers in the basic-emotions tradition, Paul Ekman among them, disagree sharply, and the argument continues in the journals.