Lisa Feldman Barrett

Their words

We find that experimenters' prior beliefs & assumptions about emotion sneak into the supposedly "data driven" or "objective" results produced by machine learning.

Their words

Saying "You don't have one brain, you have two" is an oversimplification.

Their words

It dismantles the myth that you have a "lizard brain" for instincts, wrapped in a "limbic system" for emotions, topped by a "neocortex" for rationality.

Their words

We find that infants rarely see stereotypical expressions, like frowning in sadness. Instead, infants must learn more complex, many-to-many mappings between facial movements and categories of emotion.

Their words

I use facial "configuration" instead of "expression," and emotion "perception" instead of "recognition" or "detection." These more neutral terms carry fewer assumptions.

Their words

So in Middlesex, Eugenides does a really nice job of illustrating this complexity of emotional life, the variation of emotional life that doesn’t necessarily fall into neat categories, neat parcels of ‘anger,’ ‘sadness,’ ‘fear,’ ‘disgust,’ and so on, and that’s the first reason I like the book.

Their words

I stumbled onto James’s passages about emotion buried in The Principles of Psychology, and it led me to do a systematic study of exactly what James did and didn’t say about emotion.