how connection developsWhat helps you understand how another person feels, and how being together changes the way you feel?
The answer involves their words, the situation you share, and what you have learned about each other over time. It also involves the body. A conversation takes place between people who are breathing, moving, anticipating what comes next, and making sense of what they notice.
In her October 2026 conversation with Peter Attia on The Drive, psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett brings these experiences together through her theory of constructed emotion. Her account connects feelings with the brain’s work of anticipating and meeting the body’s needs. For our relationships, it offers a way to understand both how we interpret one another and how we participate in one another’s emotional lives.
Understanding the person in the situation
Barrett begins with a discovery that changed her research. As a graduate student, she repeatedly found that participants’ reports of anxiety and sadness overlapped in ways the studies she was trying to reproduce had not predicted. She initially assumed people were having trouble identifying distinct emotions. Eventually, she began questioning the assumption that those emotions would have a separate, universal biological signature (3:29).
At 12:58, she asks Attia what he does when he is angry. Scowling is one possibility. So are speaking, staying silent, smiling, or laughing. The same person can express anger differently in different circumstances, and the same facial movement can accompany different experiences.
A 2019 review by Barrett and four colleagues examined research on facial movements and six familiar emotion categories. It found meaningful associations between some movements and emotions, alongside substantial variation across people, cultures, and situations. A face carries useful information, but a particular arrangement of its features does not reliably identify one emotional state across those contexts.
For everyday relationships, that distinction gives curiosity a practical role. You can notice a change in someone’s face while remaining interested in their explanation. Knowing the person and what is happening gives you more to work with than a raised eyebrow or a smile alone.
The past helps shape what we experience now
Barrett develops her account of prediction through a baseball example at 1:31:36. A batter prepares for where the ball is going. Repeated experience helps the player anticipate and coordinate a movement quickly enough to meet it. In her account, the brain draws on past experience to prepare action and anticipate incoming sensations, then uses new sensory information to confirm or revise its predictions.
She applies that framework to emotion as well. What you feel involves your history, the state of your body, and the situation unfolding around you. Two people can arrive at the same event with different expectations and experience it differently. Their brains have different histories to draw from.
That also gives learning a place in emotional life. Barrett emphasizes practice with feedback when discussing how we become more precise in understanding our own experiences and other people’s feelings (1:36:59). Feedback about emotion can be ambiguous. In a relationship, asking and listening give the other person a chance to add information that your first impression did not contain.
How we help regulate one another
At 1:55:24, Barrett explains allostasis as anticipating the body’s needs and preparing to meet them. She uses a body-budget metaphor to describe the balance between demands and replenishment. The resources involved include glucose, water, and salts. She explicitly calls this a metaphor, a way to picture a complex process rather than a literal account with a single balance.
Other people belong in that account. When the interview turns to caregiving, Barrett describes feeding, keeping a baby warm, and cuddling as ways adults help regulate a developing body. Children gradually take on more of that regulation themselves, while social regulation continues throughout life (1:59:50).
The quality of the relationship matters. Barrett discusses how people can support one another’s regulation or add to one another’s demands. Her example of an unsafe childhood includes both the harm and uncertainty a child faces and the supportive care that is missing. The implication is specific to how we are treated and what happens between us.
Research outside this interview provides a concrete example of social support affecting responses to threat. In a 2006 experiment, James Coan and colleagues scanned the brains of 16 married women while they anticipated possible electric shocks. Each woman held her husband’s hand, a male stranger’s hand, or no hand. Holding a husband’s hand was associated with a broader reduction in threat-related brain activity than holding a stranger’s. Higher reported marital quality predicted greater reductions in several brain regions during spousal handholding. The experiment measured brain responses under threat, giving a specific example of how a close relationship can change an experience at a bodily level.
Giving yourself a different experience to draw on
Attia makes the discussion personal at 1:39:39. When he feels upset, he tends to withdraw, including from his family. Sometimes he gets up and plays baseball or soccer with his son instead. He says he feels better afterward, while acknowledging how difficult that first movement can be.
Barrett interprets his experience through the relationship between action, prediction, and feeling. Getting up changes what his body is doing and the sensory information available to him. Playing with his son brings a different experience into the moment. This is Attia’s account of what helps him, with Barrett offering a possible explanation through her theory.
Later, she returns to that example and suggests practicing a different response before the difficult moment arrives. What begins as a deliberate choice can become more familiar through repetition (2:14:47).
Barrett’s own example is a daily practice of noticing something that inspires awe. She began with things she found readily moving, including a picture of a baby orangutan with its mother, flowers, and the sound of waves. Over time, she practiced finding that response in less obvious places, including a dandelion growing through a crack in the sidewalk. She reports that this made moments of awe more available during demanding situations (2:16:25).
Her emphasis is on developing familiarity through practice. She also acknowledges that people have different resources and opportunities to change their circumstances. For a relationship, Attia’s example illustrates one possibility within reach on a particular day. He could join his son before he felt like joining him.
The people who share our memories
When Attia asks about grief, Barrett describes losing someone close as also losing a source of bodily regulation. In her account, a loved one’s presence, words, and actions have become part of how life feels. Their absence can therefore be felt physically as well as emotionally (2:25:10).
She then offers a different kind of missing. Her daughter is grown, and they remain close. They text frequently and had breakfast together on Zoom that morning. Yet Barrett sometimes misses the exuberant two-year-old her daughter once was. Her daughter does not remember being that little girl. Barrett’s husband does (2:29:58).
He wrote down things their daughter said when she was small. They send those remembered remarks to each other during the day. Attia recognizes the experience and describes exchanging old photos and videos with his wife. The parents can share a feeling about a time their children cannot recall. Alongside the relationships they have with their children now, they have this part of family life that they remember together.
Sources
Peter Attia with Lisa Feldman Barrett. The neuroscience of emotion. The Drive, episode 413, October 26, 2026. Episode information and topic guide.
Barrett, L. F., Adolphs, R., Marsella, S., Martinez, A. M., and Pollak, S. D. (2019). Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20(1), 1–68.
Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., and Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039.