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Since then, hundreds of studies have used this method to demonstrate that this effect persists in people from all across the world, proving that emotion recognition is universal. They consistently found that people could accurately match the same emotion word to each photograph. Subjects were shown one photograph along with a set of words and had to choose the word that best matched the face. Researchers showed subjects photographs of actors exhibiting specific facial expressions believed to represent emotions like anger, fear, sadness, and happiness (Figure 1). This idea was first established by several studies done in the 1960s and 1970s. Photographs used to study universality of emotions įor a long time, it was thought that each emotion triggered a specific circuit in the brain, like a unique “fingerprint” that is uniform across individuals regardless of age, sex, and culture. Barrett’s theory of emotion, it’s first important to understand what she calls the “classical view of emotion.”įigure 1. After failing to replicate the study eight times, she realized that the wide variety of ways people describe their emotional experiences suggests that the same emotion can be experienced differently by different people. Her interest in this topic began as a graduate student when she tried to replicate a well-known phenomenon about the roots of low self-esteem and how that leads to anxiety or depression.

Barrett is a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and has spent the last few decades of her career researching emotion. Lisa Feldman Barrett aims to answer these questions in her book “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.” Dr.

But how universal are emotions, and what can current research teach us about how emotions are constructed in the brain?ĭr. You might think of emotions as one of the few universal aspects of the human experience – it seems safe to assume that all people have experienced some form of joy, sadness, and anger at some point in their lives. It’s memories like these that last the longest in our minds and ultimately make up who we are – our ability to feel a vast range of emotions, and to share those emotional experiences with others, I would argue, is one of the most unique and meaningful parts of being alive.

Take a moment and think about the last time you saw someone cry, or broke into a fit of laughter with your friends.