Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Most organisations still run on a model of emotion that science abandoned a decade ago. Senior leaders are asked to read faces, manage their own stress, and design culture using assumptions about feelings that do not survive contact with the brain. The cost shows up in misread performance reviews, blunt wellbeing programmes, and AI tools that promise to detect emotion but cannot.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a neuroscientist whose research reframes how leaders understand emotion, perception and decision-making, with direct implications for performance, wellbeing and the design of human-machine systems.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lisa Feldman Barrett
- She has reshaped the scientific consensus on emotion. Her theory of constructed emotion is now taught in psychology, neuroscience and affective computing curricula, and it directly contradicts the assumptions baked into most corporate EQ training and emotion-detection AI.
- She translates first-tier neuroscience for boardrooms without diluting it. Her two trade books, How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, are written for general readers but cite the same primary research she publishes in Science and Nature Neuroscience.
- Her work has been adopted by audiences that need it to be right, including FBI behavioural analysts, the legal community through her role as Chief Science Officer at the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, and senior medical faculties at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital.
- A leader who books her gets a researcher with NIH Pioneer Award and Guggenheim credentials, not a popular-science communicator working from secondary sources.
Biography highlights
- University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
- Chief Science Officer, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital.
- Author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
- TED speaker, with the talk “You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions” passing 6.5 million views.
- NIH Director’s Pioneer Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award; APS William James Fellow Award.
- Past President of the Association for Psychological Science; co-founder of the Society for Affective Science; over 275 peer-reviewed publications.
Biography
The textbook view of emotion, that anger, fear and joy are hard-wired circuits with universal facial signatures, dominated psychology, psychiatry and product design for most of the last century. It is also wrong. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s laboratory at Northeastern has spent twenty-five years showing that the brain constructs emotion in the moment, drawing on past experience, bodily state and cultural learning.
Her theory of constructed emotion has reshaped affective science and is now reaching the institutions that depend on getting emotion right. She advises the FBI on behavioural analysis, serves as Chief Science Officer at the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, and her work is cited in debates over emotion-detection AI and courtroom evidence.
Barrett holds a University Distinguished Professorship at Northeastern, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She has published more than 275 peer-reviewed papers, sits among the top 0.1 percent most-cited scientists in the world, and has received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.
For senior leaders, the practical payoff is a sharper model of how their own brains, and their people’s, actually work under uncertainty. That model contradicts a great deal of what corporate wellbeing, EQ training and emotion-aware technology currently sell.
Key speaking topics
- The science of emotion in the workplace
- Brain, prediction and decision-making under uncertainty
- Stress, allostasis and the body budget
- The neuroscience of self-regulation for senior leaders
- Emotion-detection AI and the limits of affective computing
- Mental health and the construction of experience
- Communication and influence grounded in brain science
Ideal for
- CEOs, CHROs and senior leadership teams reassessing wellbeing, EQ training and performance management
- Boards and risk committees evaluating emotion-recognition AI, behavioural surveillance, or affective computing investments
- Healthcare, legal and security organisations whose decisions hinge on interpreting human behaviour
- Senior leaders wanting a substantive, science-led perspective on stress, resilience and decision quality
Audience outcomes
- A working understanding of how the brain predicts and constructs emotion, replacing the “universal emotions” model that underpins most corporate EQ content.
- A clearer view of what emotion-detection technology can and cannot reliably do, useful for evaluating vendors and policy.
- Practical implications for stress, recovery and senior decision-making, grounded in the brain’s energy regulation rather than pop-psychology.
- Sharper questions about how performance reviews, hiring assessments and customer research read emotional signals.