March 12, 2009: Lisa Feldman Barrett (Boston College)

• http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/psych/faculty_staff/barrett.html

Of mice and men: On the nature of emotion

Scientists who emphasize that humans are animals focus on one set of facts when defining and studying emotion. Scientists who emphasize human uniqueness focus on a different set. What the field needs is a model that can account for all the facts, where specific-general and species-specific aspects of emotion are incorporated within one unifying framework. I will suggest one possible framework, and illustrate how it is consistent with a broad array of behavioral and neuroimaging findings from our lab. I will then discuss the implication of the model and our findings for the issue of mind-brain correspondence.