Lisa Feldman Barrett reading guide
I talk a lot about the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett. Here’s a reading guide based on my personal interests to help people familiarize themselves with her research.
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain — Easy reading for a popular audience, but with more than enough science to understand what she thinks and why she’s right. Start here.
“The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization” — The same argument as above, but much more informationally dense. A great hub of evidence and references for further reading.
“Constructionist Approaches to Emotion in Psychology and Related Fields” — Outlines the main ideas of psychological constructionism, generalizing beyond emotion to the construction of memory, perception, and behavior. The best modern starting point if you don’t care about emotion specifically.
“An active inference theory of allostasis and interoception in depression” — Has a really nice, readable explanation of the interoception-and-allostasis theory of psychological phenomena that distinguishes psychological constructionism. Helps with understanding the ideas in the above book and papers.
“Interoception as modeling, allostasis as control” — Big and dense, but really important for how to think about interoception and allostasis and how these seemingly biological concepts can be generalized to perception-cognition-action in any guise.
“Concepts, goals and the control of survival-related behaviors” — An application of psychological constructionism to motor behavior, specifically motor reflexes. Aside from skewering ideas of dedicated circuits and one-to-one maps, the application of a theory of psychological phenomena to motor behavior suggests a unification of cognition and action.
“Evidence for a Large-Scale Brain System Supporting Allostasis and Interoception in Humans” — Relatively dry, but an important mass of evidence for the “everything is interoception and allostasis” point of view.
“The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure” — An application of psychological constructionism to moral psychology. Aside from being another application of psychological constructionism, this theory is very important for understanding relationship regulation theory.
“Are Emotions Natural Kinds?” — No, they are not. Start here to stop believing in natural kinds.
“Categories and Their Role in the Science of Emotion” — Scientists do a lot of categorizing. This is a great analysis of the causes and consequences of that, especially the problems that can occur by adhering to a typology that hasn’t been empirically pinned down.
“Context Reconsidered: Complex Signal Ensembles, Relational Meaning, and Population Thinking in Psychological Science” — Contests the view that context is a mediator rather than a creator; c.f. Esther Thelen’s “everything counts” view of development. Also discusses relational realism. Reading between the lines, you have ideas of signals as agents and cognitive phenomena as the activity of an economy of signals.
“Affect as a Psychological Primitive” — What it says on the tin. Nothing in this is limited to human minds IMO, so this paper helps to support the search for affect in arbitrary intelligences.
“On the Automaticity of Emotion” — If something feels automatic, does that mean it is automatic? No: a process can feel fast, sudden, and uncontrollable and in fact be the result of a complex control process oriented toward long-run outcomes. A good intuition buster.
“Reconstructing the Past: A Century of Ideas About Emotion in Psychology” — A history of psychological constructionism.
Talks
Lisa has given many talks. Here are three great lectures.
She has also been on many podcasts, try this one.