[10] The resulting research direction became her life's work: understanding the nature of emotion in the brain.

[14] In addition to academic work, Barrett has written two science books for the public, How Emotions are Made (2017) and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020), and her TED talk was among the 25 most popular worldwide in 2018.

[15] At the beginning of her career, Barrett's research focused on the structure of affect, having developed experience-sampling methods[16] and open-source software to study emotional experience.

Barrett and members at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory study the nature of emotion broadly from social-psychological, psychophysiological, cognitive science, and neuroscience perspectives, and take inspiration from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics.

Before that, she held academic positions at Boston College (1996-2010) and was an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Pennsylvania State University.