'How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain' - Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett

Learn how emotions are made and get an insight into the secret life of the brain, with Canadian writer and psychologist, Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett.
One of the world’s most respected scientists in the field of human emotion, her book, 'How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain', has radically changed our understanding of the way we feel.
In a rare Australasian appearance, Lisa will discuss the way that culture, environment and personal history create emotion. Her research has vast implications for almost every aspect of our lives: from legal systems, to parenting to the way we understand the human mind and experience life.

[@PassportGods]

18:40 simplistic questions. 23:48 emotional tracking (if you engage in different actions during instances of the same emotion, physical changes in your body track actions or predicted actions) 27:10 indications (28:24 emotions are not written in stone). 37:14 please take this info 42:56 summary 43:20 Logic v. Emotion 55:05 you are an architects of your own experience.

[@heidi.a.thomson]

Thank you!

[@ravik-qq7ee]

Here is an example of what Professor Barrett is saying: A child, while running slips and falls. No serious injuries. She looks around notices a few adults who have watched her fall. She suddenly begins to express hurt from fall and becomes teary eyed.

[@biancaferrarijablonskis2623]

What an eye opener, thank you Lisa for bringing your work to life!

[@brianbuday8639]

She is first rate. Discovered Dr.Barrett on Lex Fridman 👍

[@leighatkins22]

Discovered her on Russell Brand 👍

[@manoftheworld1000]

I discovered her on June Gruber😌.

[@yuzellenienaber3358]

Discovered her on The Huberman Podcast 😊

[@tampeters6422]

Discovered her on Adam Grants Re thinking podcast

[@bellezavudd]

So Facial expression understanding needs a major face-lift. On another note, while traveling I was surprised and fascinated to learn other countries/ cultures have different sounds and words for the 'speech' of various animals. The obvious everyday sounds ( obvious to me and most americans over the age of 4 ) of dogs expressing "bow-wow", "woof", or 'ruff'' were not so obvious to many non english speakers. Of course this was long before the information highway was opened for travel so those are sounds/concepts are probably becomeing more universal with each passing day.

[@PieYORU180]

Many thanks lisa maim, It's helps alot❤❤

[@user-ts6yy9qu7d]

感激分享，歡迎來台灣。

[@lenbilello6222]

Such an eye opener! Wish some the AI companies would keep this front and center in their ethos

[@hayzelwashington6354]

Great video

[@maximilyen]

Wonderful scientist.

[@malcolmarmstrong906]

Humble is involved but nice and selfless and interacting

[@thesmartrn8948]

Hopefully, this will be common knowledge in another 60 years

[@zengokigyh]

EXACTLY MY THOUGHTS BRO HAHAHAHAHAHA

[@kirstinstrand6292]

It's important to know what we typically project in our faces. I must work on my smile under all situations. 🥸

[@saints7827]

she is so amazing

[@argolo9512]

There's an academic debate going on over decades about universality of emotions. Darwin started this and Paul Ekman provided further evidence. Lisa disagrees with the hypothesis, but the real implications of her empirical findings are subtle. She is showing that the model might not be accurate, but we knew that already. The categorization of emotions is just an attempt to explain the universality of some phenomena. For instance, most people react to pleasant experiences with a smile and aversion is related to nose wrinkling.This is also true for other primates and even blind newborns. Human behavior is much more complex, hence any taxonomy of emotion will probably be inaccurate. However, it does not mean that universal patterns do not exist.

[@stemcareers8844]

I think the point of the talk was to say that a smile or nose wrinkling could indicate various different emotions and that happiness or aversion could be expressed without those specific responses. Basically, as she says, variation is the norm and context is important. If you observe someone smiling because of something pleasant then the context (the pleasant thing) gives you a clue to their emotional state but the same person could smile wistfully or sadly. So I think its reasonable to say that _what_ we do with our faces is universal i.e we smile or wrinkle our noses but _why_ we do those things is not i.e there are a variety of reasons we do those things and sometimes we may not do them at all. So it really isnt a universal pattern that pleasant = smiling and aversion = nose wrinkling. Its just one of the many ways that humans and other animals could react. Variation is the universal pattern.

[@alejandrarodriguezsanchez6667]

Variability is too wide and all gestures are context dependent, therefore such white str8 male universal models are GARBAGE. Is it that difficult to accept? Need ad hoc adjustments honey?

[@slowdown7276]

Paul Ekman has been debunked about the micro expressions right?

[@leighatkins22]

I believe that ppl are also capable of picking up data from others in the form of electromagnetic exchange which also influences our judgement of others' emotional states, and that explains why some of us are more accurate in our assessments, but only if we are present to experience that person as well. This is based upon basic electronic and scientific concepts as well as personal experience. But what she is saying backs up my own experience here in that when i asked to be shown why i was "such an emotional basketcase", and i was shown that i picked up other ppl's emotions, i suddenly realized that i was being burdened with others' emotional weight and that i didn't have to be. So i chose to create a test to see if a feeling was mine or not, and when i discover it is not, i throw it away... this proved to me that i had full control over which emotions i experienced and which i did not, and that the data i was picking up was merely triggering sympathetic impulses in my brain which cascaded into emotional reactions. 10yrs later, with careful self-training, i am now in full control of my emotions, after a life-time of being thoroughly overwhelmed by them. She is definitely right...

[@gillywillybythesea]

What an interesting thought: I am also an emotional 'basketcase', to use your words: something not uncommon to many of us with ADHD. I very much like the idea of checking in with myself to establish whether an emotion I am experiencing is my own or another's, and discarding it if it is the latter. Part of me believes my emotional understanding of others is a useful tool/skill to have, in that it makes me highly empathetic with another's situation - yet it's also true to say that I may well have misplaced emotion (going by what Dr Feldman Barrett discussed) and am simply guessing, albeit at a subconscious level, another's emotion, based on my own reading of the emotions they appear to be expressing. If nothing else, your post makes me believe it would be useful for me to be at least a little more mindful of the interplay between what I perceive and how I perceive it because, as you say, it can be truly burdensome. Thanks for your insights!

the point about the electro-magnetic exchange is spot-on, because all matter is a function of electro-magnetic radiation in different spectra, and what we perceive as reality is the effect of electro-magnetic interactions, refractions, interferences. all mater is built of the same subatomic components as light, and what we perceive is the peaks of the waves interfering with each other, much like in the double-slit experiments. and radiation is subject to coherence and resonance-so yup, we do, quite literarily, pick up energy from others ;). some people, for various reasons, are more sensitive to that influence than others, and often resonate with the frequencies of others at the cost of their own ‘music’.

[@filipsmith5078]

Can you share some of the ways you trained yourself to become in control of your emotions?

[@Will-ds2qw]

LFB rocks!

[@jyothishmg5041]

I would like to know how music trigger emotions...

[@annak29]

43:40 "fallacy of battle between emotions and thinking"

[@heidi.a.thomson]

I saw a microscopic photo. :) All those years in a lab.

[@TheTobbe31]

I still want to where emotions come from

[@pedronorman5396]

So the neuro-motor activation of facial muscles in response to fear, anger and threat is still indicative of a sympathetic fight-flight response. I think it’s extremely relevant that different cultures all recognize the features of the fight-flight response, because it fundamentally denotes a lack of safety. It’s interesting that she’s limited emotional activation to such small parameters. Similarly, the facial expression of emotions is merely a reflection of emotional intensity. The faces of someone in the midst of pain and orgasm look similar because they both reflect similar engagement of the self and self-involvement during the event. I find it interesting that’s she’s making such sweeping assumptions based solely from facial expressions rather than whole body somatic responses. Her perspective is interesting but seems to be missing a lot. She also took a cheap shot at “The Body Keeps The Score”, as though the author is proposing that somatic responses are controlled by anything other than the motor cortex. I know she’s a neuroscience PhD but I’m very curious if she’s remotely aware of her own somatic experience of emotions. Because based on this lecture, I highly doubt it. I’m always amazed at how completely dissociated highly educated people are from their own mind-body experience. That’s really my overarching takeaway from this lecture - she’s completely dissociated from her somatic experience, relative to a mind-body practitioner, mindfulness meditation practitioner, Indian yogi, or traditional medicine healer.

[@sleepsmartsmashstress740]

It is critical for scientists to be emotionally completely dissociated from their own mind otherwise the research gets tainted with bias.

[@stemcareers8844]

Take a look at her books. Her work isnt just based on facial expressions, it also covers physiological responses and how the brain works

[@klbwashere]

@@sleepsmartsmashstress740my ex is a doctor and a covert narcissist. he slammed the BACK of my head off the corner it a huge hotel bathroom door. and he knows about the ufc fighter who ended up handicap after a blow to the back of the head. they are still lurking in 2024. the coverts are actually getting worse. keep a close eye and hear people!

[@djmcquillan]

Hmm. She states plenty of evidence about how emotional expression is variable in intensity & perhaps culturally, then goes on to make the claim that emotions are not written in the body, they are constructed in the brain. I'm not following here. This seems a bit of a leap. I'm happy to accept that there may not be standard patterns of emotional expression. As a meditator and mindbody therapist it's fairly common to encounter patterns of muscular contraction which when unpacked represent repressed emotional expression, generally due to judgement or trauma. I would say that the mind and body are completely interrelated. When someone experiences an emotion there are cognitive and bodily components of this. Also she describes emotions as a construction that occurs when we interpret external stimuli and cross-reference them with internal sensations. The standard model here is that external stimuli are compared to our previous experience, and that our emotional and movement response is a product of our interpretation of these sensations (e.g. the perception of being threatened triggers a fear response). I'm sure that reality is more nuanced than this, and that there is a feedback loop between internal sensations and external experience which adds information to the picture, but I don't see any evidence presented here to throw out the standard model & replace it with her idea. Surely a combination of both would be more elegant. Am I missing something here?

[@robsmittenaar]

She is saying that the body and the mind are strong related by interoception. But only in mood (Valence) and arousal.

[@nikhilmahindroo2242]

Hi dear Like your curiosity Read her book 7.5 lessons abt the brain. They will get answered

[@coconutzsmoothy7805]

BPD involves the amigdala and prefrontal cortex being different in size compared to ppl without BPD. So emotional regulation is harder. I don't see how her theory relates to this example of physical causes of emotional dysregulation. Also antipsychotics for example subdue emotions which does not involve changing our predictions intellectually.

[@ellingolsen3194]

An emotion is something that tells you how important something is predicted to be based on your memories.

[@stemcareers8844]

Her book on the topic gives more detail. I think this presentation was an abridged version that primarily focused on facial expressions.

[@Anna-ky7ix]

They also use it for a pain scale in a doctors office! They correlate a number value with a matching face coordinating to “pain” level expression. So silly! I do t make those faces when in pain at all!

[@malcolmarmstrong906]

Presentation relativity communicability

[@Gundog55]

Interesting talk. There is a study called “Human cerebellum and corticocerebellar connections involved in emotional memory enhancement” that discovers there are several areas of the brain that involves emotional memory. I would be interested is seeing a study involving visually impaired people and the differences vs the visual able people. On a separate subject, I wonder what part of the brain is activated to favor “a Democrat majority Senate.” Is that a historical emotion?

[@chrisprenmusic]

Fear faces evolved from aggression faces as a defence mechanism. Also, bliss and pain look the same because the link is strong inner focus on sensation. So otherwise, of course faces don’t link to things as vague as emotions, but we do share across cultures and experiences face expressions to experiences. So we are really good at guessing and empathizing, especially with context. You’re right that reading emotions is not simply a bunch of face muscle evaluations, it’s a process of empathy, which takes practice. But those devoid of that intuition can still use face expressions (and body language) to give more general pieces of information, just not emotions per se. So for example, that person is experience a strong focus on internal sensations. Or that person, is experiencing threat, and then context helps the rest of the way.

[@LakshmiiSharma]

After reading everyone I comc that's world is complex really things are diff accross so many dimensions,domains,time period and variable goes to infinite .What is human we don't know it is varying across cultures,at diff time period,at diff situation and yes so much that we can't even see with naked eyes.And any kind of explainations given bu to make sense of things is just hunches,guess and most of may be wrong but most of trapped into habit of believing and stopped questioning that's what gives us sense of certainty but we don't know . As Socrates said I know I don't know

[@sleepsmartsmashstress740]

The non real nature of emotional processes in the brain and their susceptibility to being studied only through their outflows that poses study design hurdles, true neurobiology of emotions is doomed to remain a mystery or enigma for humans. In short brain cannot decipher itself.

[@CaraDees]

So what about Micro Expressions then? That science is all wrong???? Gosh Lisa blowing my mind again!

[@yu-jeongchoi846]

2:41

[@lilyl5492]

this sounds more like a science/education/tech problem rather than a people problem. in the moment there would be an instinct for more nuance in understanding people. Why not throw away the stereotypes? Is that is the goal of this talk? Doesn't it make more sense to divorce the physical responses from the stereotypes entirely (get rid of them in the science), and treat the cognitive, the social-personal experience as another thing that is tested a different way, i.e. thoughts vs meaning making vs mood/valance and nervous system activation vs physical cues? I find it odd that she still falls back on those same stereotypes of emotions in her ideas of what to do next -e.g. using AI to discover you might have 10 default facial expressions that you draw on when angry. which is surely doing the same thing but at a much finer scale?

[@nikhilmahindroo2242]

It seems she has challenged some long standing belief you hold just like me. That's a good space to grow 👍

[@JoshuaAHolmes]

Lol yes, teaching something that is logical. There's always a form of projection when one peels back the onion, as long as they can understand that we must do this without emotions and feelings. Many clinicians have the ability to look at situations from their own perceptions, however, we also need to lay down our own swords and seek the truth. Your body feels the pain, your body produces a reaction and what shall we label these physical feelings, how does someone who experiences vision difficulties express themselves through the way their body reacts to their environment or other human beings? What about a person who has a brain development disorder or mental illness? Looking deep into the onion is about teaching us that love is more important than any form of object or are we really projecting our own difficulties on how we see ourselves? Are we denying who we are as whole human beings with our own bodies, minds, emotions and souls?

[@jamesmatheson5813]

In.short emotions are when the heart beats illegally and heats bloods or the blood is cold or theres a lack of oxygen in blood when the blood reaches the nervous system The nervous system sends back emotions to tell you there is a change in blood content

[@lisamackenzie104]

I, so, want this information to be disseminated in the counselling field

[@malcolmarmstrong906]

Profound pleasure, or, depth of perception, or, sensability_Re the girls second chocolate drink?

[@silvioi9061]

What I’d like to ask her is the failure of autistic people in recognising emotions. I also think that she’s too interested in adult performing of emotions. But what about newborns? Don’t they display primary emotions the same way in every culture?

[@jamesmatheson5813]

Emotions are caused when blood compresses When the.heart pressure changes it makes blood compress which causes the blood temperature to change That change in temperature causes the nervous system to act up Emotions are the nervous systems way of saying the blood temperature has changed Which is why people exercising are more prone to being aggressive then people who are relaxed When blood temperature amd pressure increases it sends a signjal to the nervous system that the body needs to have more strength I believe all blood pressure is temperature but temperature is read in .001 and not .1 fractions If blood changes to much in temperature your emotions change Thats why people get chills and abdominal discomfort

[@kirstinstrand6292]

This is rather bizarre to me. I don't understand the usefulness of her research. Will it assist human capacities? In what manner will they become happier, more productive, more self aware so that intra or inter relationships are enhanced. Will parenting skills improve? Will these constructs be useful at all various industries? Perhaps they could be helpful in the AI field or for aspiring actors, public speakers, politicians, salespeople?

[@cb7324]

This presentation is USELESS without the slides. What a shame.

[@Obnyr]

😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠

[@heidihageman523]

Uh um. That's annoying. Woops that's an emotion😢

[@walkerpercy8702]

In a nutshell, this is daft.

[@jayarava]

Someone doesn't like having their deeply held beliefs challenged. LOL Try some real science instead.

[@leighatkins22]

@@jayarava Hasn't learned to deal with their cognitive disonance yet... that's called opening one's mind...

[@lindaelarde2692]

Are you a neuroscientist? If so, please present your data that refutes her data...

[@marcoribeiro3053]

I love this talk. I don't agree with everything she says. For example: Birds don't have language, or rudimentary language. Human language is unique to humans. No other creature can do what the human brain does (where an arbitrary sound is linked to a particular concept, i.e. a word, leading to a true meaning). Animals may develop ASSOCIATIONS between sounds and objects. This is utterly different from language; animals do not have language and are not capable of comprehending "meaning."