In fact, when is the last time you saw anyone win an Academy Award for scowling when they're angry?

Right now we have, you know, some people in politics who scowl when they're angry, but that's pretty unusual.

Welcome to the Art of Charm. I'm Jordan Harbinger.

On this episode we'll be talking with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. She is an innovator in the field of psychology and one of the world's foremost researchers on emotions.

Today's discussion includes the idea that emotions aren't what we think they are and what we've thought they are for the past few hundred years.

A concept called effective realism. How our brain predicts what we think we're hearing and seeing and how this can affect our behavior and reactions.

And we're also going to investigate how emotions are influenced by culture and how certain cultures have emotions that other cultures have never even seen nor experienced.

And last but not least, how we can expand our emotional palettes to become more adept at both describing and feeling more nuanced emotions and feelings.

All this and more on this episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. And by the way, if you're new to the show, we'd love to send you some top episodes and the AOC toolbox.

That's where we discuss the science of people and discuss concepts like reading body language and having charismatic nonverbal communication.

The science of attraction, negotiation techniques, social engineering, networking and influence strategies, persuasion tactics and everything else that we teach here at the Art of Charm.

Check that out at the Art of Charm.com slash toolbox or in our iPhone app at the Art of Charm.com slash iPhone. Also at the Art of Charm.com you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.

Whether this is your first or 500th episode of AOC, we're always glad to have you with us. Now let's hear from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Thank you for joining us on the show today. My pleasure. You publish a lot of stuff. It's kind of nuts. Why? What's going on here?

Well, a couple of things. First, I have a fairly large lab. I have about 20 full-time people in my lab, full-time scientists. And it's my job to train them and to make sure that their research careers are developing well.

So that requires publications. Also, we have a lot of lines of research in my lab. So that means a certain number of publications for scientific discoveries in each of those lines.

I would say that the amount that I publish is not that different from other influential scientists to neuroscience, maybe a little more than what you might see in the typical psychology lab.

Gotcha. Okay. And you do focus on the nature of emotion from both psychological and neuroscience perspectives, which actually is surprising because I think a lot of what I've been reading in business books or what I've been seeing even in psychology books. They only focus on one of those perspectives. And the problem with that is there's a lot of antiquated models of the brain and things that we, I don't know, read in 1970 that people are still spouting off myself included, frankly, because I didn't know about the nature of emotions.

And that's what we're going to talk about today, hopefully.

Yeah. The way I like to think of it is like this. Psychology is the science of the mind, the categories of mental events that we use really were bestowed to us by the ancient Greeks.

And we still use many of the categories that were around in ancient characterizations of mental life. So it's really mental philosophy that's being tested in the laboratory.

And as a consequence, psychologists start with categories like anger, sadness, fear, and they go looking for the physical basis of those categories.

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