Study of human emotions At the beginning of her career, Barrett's research focused on the structure of
affect, having developed experience-sampling methods and open-source software to study emotional experience. Barrett and members at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory study the nature of emotion broadly from social-psychological,
psychophysiological,
cognitive science, and neuroscience perspectives, and take inspiration from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. They also explore the role of emotion in vision and other psychological phenomena. In 2010, she joined the psychology faculty at Northeastern University. Before that, she held academic positions at Boston College (1996-2010) and was an
assistant professor of clinical psychology at Pennsylvania State University. Notable doctoral students of Barrett's include
Tamlin Conner. Her research has focused on the main issues in the science of emotions such as: • What are the basic building blocks of emotional life? • Why is it that people quickly and effortlessly perceive anger, sadness, fear in themselves and others, yet scientists have been unable to specify a set of clear criteria for empirically identifying these emotional events? • What roles do language and conceptual knowledge play in emotion perception • Are there really differences between the emotional lives of men and women (see )
Theory of constructed emotion Barrett developed her current theory of constructed emotion originally during her graduate training. According to Barrett, emotions are "not universal, but vary from culture to culture" (see
Emotions and culture). She says that emotions "are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment.". Barrett also claims that "Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages" and that smiling "became popular only in the eighteenth century as dentistry became more accessible and affordable". ==Honors and awards==