Twenty-five years ago, Lisa Feldman Barrett ran a series of psychology experiments whose conclusions seemed to defy common sense. It turned out common sense was wrong, and has been for 2,000 years. The result is a radical, new theory of how the brain creates emotions and a novel view of human nature.

Dr. Barrett is now a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASLab) at Northeastern University, with research appointments in the departments of psychiatry and radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed research papers in top scientific journals on emotion, psychology, and neuroscience. She educates the public about science with her articles for the New York Times and other media outlets. Her research teams span the globe, studying people in the West, the East and remote parts of Africa.