A recent New York Times Sun­dayRe­view piece by Lisa Feldman Bar­rett, Uni­ver­sity Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Psy­chology, dis­man­tles the age-​​old mis­con­cep­tion that indi­vidual emotions—anger, dis­gust, fear, sad­ness, joy—arise from spe­cific “blobs of brain cir­cuitry” anchored in dis­crete regions of the human brain. Barrett’s own ground­breaking research, con­ducted in the Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Affec­tive Sci­ence Lab­o­ra­tory, gives the lie to this “blob-​​ology” model. In a com­pre­hen­sive analysis of neu­roimaging studies over a 15-​​year span, she and her col­leagues showed that, in reality, a set of inter­acting brain regions are active during a whole slew of emo­tional states. None of these brain regions is spe­cific to emo­tion, or to any other mental state. Instead, the brain is filled with general-​​purpose ingredients—or networks—that interact to pro­duce our feel­ings, thoughts, and actions.

The Sun­dayRe­view piece fol­lowed her oped in WBUR’s Com­mon­Health about Pixar’s movie Inside Out, which explores how emo­tions operate in a young girl’s mind. “It’s a great movie,” she told us, “but it’s com­pletely inac­cu­rate as far as the neu­ro­science goes.” We asked Bar­rett to pro­vide some insight on the real science.