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Grant recipient
studies psychology of emotion
(August/September
2008 Issue)
Local psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D. was one of 12 recipients
of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Pioneer Award.
Feldman Barrett, only the second psychologist to receive this award
since the program's 2004 inception, will receive a $2.5 million
grant to fund her work on the psychology of emotion. Unlike most
grants which fund individual projects, the NIH award is given to
scientists whose ideas are considered innovative and groundbreaking
in various areas in biomedical and behavioral research.
A professor of psychology and director of the Boston College Interdisciplinary
Affective Science Lab, Feldman Barrett also has appointments at
Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She spoke
with New England Psychologist's Catherine Robertson Souter
about her work on emotion and her plans to use the grant money to
study how the brain creates the categories we know as fear, anger,
sadness or happiness.
Q: The work you do on emotion has been called 'groundbreaking'
and 'innovative' and that it could change the way we look at nearly
everything in the field of psychology. Can you explain.
A: My lab studies the basic question of what is an emotion.
When you have a feeling of anger or sadness, what is your brain
doing to create that feeling?
People believe that there are specific, distinct mechanisms in
the brain - one for anger, one for sadness, one for fear. That hypothesis
has been around for a long time, over a century and the work that
we do pretty much challenges that view.
Instead of thinking about emotions as on/off switches that are
triggered by something in the world, and once tripped you have a
feeling and a certain behavior, a certain bodily pattern and a certain
expression on your face; we treat emotions as if they are emergent
events that are created, constructed out of more basic "ingredients."
Q: Ingredients?
A: There are three ingredients. The first is called core affect,
which is the automatic pleasant/unpleasant, high arousal/low arousal
state that you have in reaction to the world. Affect is the psychological
feeling of your body state.
Then there is conceptual knowledge - categories of emotions and
how you understand the meaning of those feelings in relation to
the world and the immediate circumstance.
Then there is an ingredient which is basically attention or executive
control - your ability to use certain concepts and not others.
So, instead of asking if there is a problem with sadness and depression,
maybe it's that the ingredients of the emotion are disordered. Some
people may have a really reactive affect system so every little
thing perturbs them. Somebody who is depressed may have a problem
with their affective system. It may not have anything to do with
what they know about emotion, with their vocabulary for emotion.
Q: How does this affect treatment procedures?
A: If you can diagnose difficulties in terms of these ingredients
as opposed to taking a more symptom-based approach, then you might
be able to more effectively treat people. Certain kinds of treatments
work for changing a person's conceptual system but don't work for
changing a person's affective reactivity or response. So drugs work
well for changing affective reactivity but they don't work so well
for changing how you conceptualize or understand your internal state
relative to your life circumstances.
Things like cognitive behavioral therapy target your cognitions
but in our view, cognitions are also the endpoints, the products.
It might be better to do something more insight oriented like psychodynamic.
Some of the methods of cognitive behavioral might be really useful
but interventions themselves, like telling them to answer their
thoughts with other thoughts, are treating the outcome instead of
the cause.
Q: How would this model affect other areas of science?
A: There are other things that are suggested by this model that
are a little more profound. If these are basic ingredients of mental
life, then it suggests that they play a role in other things that
are not emotional. For instance, there are really good anatomical
reasons to believe that your affective state can influence what
you see - not just how you interpret what you see. So, when you
are in a highly aroused affective state, you are more likely to
see certain kinds of things like frowns or smiles than in a neutral
state. Somebody who is responsive or reactive to the world, always
feeling something, always activated in some way - it's not just
that they are interpreting things differently, they are seeing things
differently.
Part of what we are doing is testing this hypotheses to see if
there are things that could maintain the over-responsivity that
you see in anxiety and depression and so on that are much more sensory
driven.
Q: How did you formulate your ideas?
A: When I was a graduate student, I found that there was a huge
variability in how people distinguish between anxiety and depression.
Some people can be really specific about their feelings, and others
just say, "I feel bad." There are huge individual differences that
are not related to psychopathology.
I thought that if you could find an accurate way of measuring whether
a person is angry, you could see how specific they were being. So
I combed the literature to find a criterion that would let me measure
anger and realized that there isn't one. Objective measures do give
evidence whether someone is in a positive or negative state, but
you can't give the category. There is no measure of anger or sadness
or fear that allows a scientist to objectively say that a person
is angry or sad using facial motion or physiological changes.
Yet, if you show a perceiver a face, they can automatically tell
you what that person is feeling. I thought this was an interesting
paradox - perceivers can categorize emotion easily. But objective
measures don't see these categories - people have been searching
for them for 100 years and nobody's been able to say this is the
definite pattern for any emotion.
Q: How does your work with emotions affect your own life?
A: One thing I've learned is to get a good night's sleep. When
you don't get enough sleep, it feels miserable and it is easy to
conceptualize that as an emotion.
What I am not saying is that people who are seriously depressed,
all they have to do is eat or sleep better. I just think that in
this culture, we tend to really emotionalize physical states that
are just physical.
Q: But couldn't you say that when there is something really
wrong, it is still a physical state? Even depression?
A: Sure - I think that we live in a very Cartesian culture -
Descartes believed that the mind and the body were separate things
and we also believe this as a general rule, as a culture. But, in
fact, everything is a physical state.
Everything is a mental state. Every moment of your waking life
you are sensing information from the world and from your body and
there is this intrinsic activity in your brain that is basically
stored experience from the past and those three things are happening
all the time. You can use any two to make sense of the third one.
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