Logic of Emotion Lab

We are very proud to announce that Dr. Erik Nook is the recipient of the Society for Research in Psychopathology’s 2025 Early Career Award! Congratulations @eriknook.bsky.social 🎉

Exciting day — we have a new lab manager, joining us from Stanford! Emily is interested in studying how people process and communicate emotional experiences, especially in clinical settings. Let's give her a warm welcome!

Cheering on a baseball game, @trentonthunder.com, with an amazing summer lab team!

What a year it's been for the lab - so many incredible accomplishments! A special shoutout to Angie on her graduation and all of her outstanding work. Our junior students also wrapped up strong projects and are heading into senior year, ready for discoveries.

Huge congratulations to Chantal @talvaldivia.bsky.social
for receiving an NSF Honorable Mention and to Dan
@danmirea.bsky.social for being awarded a Procter Fellowship from the Graduate School earlier this month! We’re so proud of their achievements!

Join us in congratulating our lab’s incredible poster presenters at SAS 2025! We’re so proud of their hard work and accomplishments.

@raziasahi.bsky.social
@claire-whiting.bsky.social
@hennavartiainen.bsky.social
@smesquiti.bsky.social
@milkawaniak.bsky.social
Angie Challman

We’re thrilled to celebrate Erik for co-authoring the Best Paper at SAS (Nencheva et al., 2024) and Dan for winning the Diversity Award!

Beyond these achievements, our lab members gave fantastic talks: @eriknook.bsky.social @raziasahi.bsky.social @danmirea.bsky.social @claire-whiting.bsky.social

Last but not least, we have a great lineup of fantastic presentations on the final day. Hope to see you at SAS!

On Friday, we are continuing our SAS presentations with three amazing lab members - don't miss it!

We are thrilled about SAS 2025! Mark your calendars to see our lab's latest work! Check out the schedule for Thursday - Emotion Regulation Pre-conference:

We discuss implications for affective and developmental science in the paper, but one that we're curious about is whether our results explain why folks with low emotion differentiation tend to think of their emotions as merely "happy" or "sad" - these words come to mind first!

The 1st emotion words that people tended to produce were those they learned earliest in life. Interestingly, the dimensions that shape emotion word accessibility were stable across age: Both children and adults tended to start their responses with words they learned early in life

We also tested whether affective and linguistic dimensions predicted the order in which participants thought of emotion words. Above and beyond the classic circumplex dimensions (i.e., valence and arousal), the strongest predictor of word order was actually age of acquisition.

We found that verbal fluency and emotion fluency followed similar age-related trajectories, increasing across childhood and adolescence before plateauing around 18-19 years of age. Thus, emotion fluency seems to be a subtype of verbal fluency, rather than a distinct capacity.

Here, we measured emotion fluency/verbal fluency by asking participants (4-25 year-olds) to produce as many emotion/fruit words as possible in 1min.

These studies have only been conducted in adults, leaving the relation between emotion fluency and verbal fluency uncharted in youth, when emotion concepts are still developing.

A handful of prior studies have examined emotion fluency in adults, seeking to chart the key predictors of emotion fluency and its potential relations with mental health, as facility with emotion words might provide greater efficacy managing one’s emotions

We seek to investigate two central questions: How does the ability to rapidly generate emotion words (i.e., emotion fluency) vary across age? And what can we learn about the organization of emotion words based on how people respond in a task like this?

New Paper! Adults differ in their ability to generate emotion and non-emotion words, but how these develop is unclear. We found both increases with age, plateau in adolescence, and are correlated. Negative words were the most common. Emotion fluency may be a subtype of verbal fluency. osf.io/h3gtp/

Undergraduate student standing in front of a poster board with a community-generated histogram and post-it notes on a circumplex model

So grateful for Princeton's Spring Into Science! At our outreach booth, youth raced to name emotion words in our emotion fluency task, generating a community histogram. We also introduced concepts such as valence and arousal using a circumplex model. We love community outreach!

LEmo Lab Presenting at SAS, Undergraduate Edition [LEmo lab logo on right] 4 colored bands with headshots and information about the conference are listed in the following order Jesus Arroyo - Undergrad Thesis Student Accepting mindfulness-based interventions: Do religious vs. scientific framings affect a patient's acceptance? Flash Talk. 3.2.24.4:45pm Tiffany Cao - Undergrad Thesis Student Examining differences in social reappraisal efficacy across first- and second-language in Spanish-English bilinguals. Poster. 3.3.24. 12:30pm. Does a less clear sense of self predict higher conformity to others' emotions? Poster. 3.3.24. 3:15pm Sofia Baran - Undergrad Thesis Student Expressive writing and the perceived other: Productive psychopoathological intervention? Date and Location TBD

And we are extra-super pumped for our STELLAR undergraduate thesis students who are also presenting @affectscience.bsky.social . Many of them are on the post-bacc market, so be sure to check out their truly innovative scholarship!!!

LEmo Lab Presenting at SAS [LEmo lab logo on right] 4 colored bands with headshots and information about the conference are listed in the following order Dr. Razia Sahi - Postdoctoral Scholar Investigating the effects of emotion naming on emotion regulation: Contextual, social, and temporal dimensions. Poster. 3.1.24. 6:35pm Chantal Valdivia-Moreno - Lab Manager Emotion essentialism and its relations with other affective processes from childhood to young adulthood. Poster. 3.1.24. 6:35pm Claire Whiting - PhD Student Evaluating expressive writing as an intervention to improve emotion differentiation. Poster. 3.2.24. 3:05pm Henna Vartiainen - PhD Student Tracking treatment outcomes using sentiment analysis. Symposium. 3.2.24. 10:45am

We are sp pumped for @affectscience.bsky.social!!!
Learn more more about our work on emotion naming, emotion essentialism, emotion differentiation, and treatment outcomes! @raziasahi.bsky.social @talvaldivia.bsky.social @clairewhiting @hennavartiainen

In left-hand corner is the logic of emotion lab logo. In the right-hand corner is the Princeton University logo. Centered between the logos in black writing reads "Writing Study." In main body of text, bolded title reads, "Are you feeling stressed, down, or anxious?" with a sad rain cloud image in the background. Rest of ad reads, "We are looking for study participants aged 18-25" Participants can earn up to $120 and must be fluent in English and be able to make in-person visits to our lab in Princeton, NJ. Parking and transportation support available if needed. Get in touch with us by emailing lemolab@princeton.edu with the Subject: Writing Study or learning more by visiting our website at lemolab.princeton.edu

New Study! Looking for participants aged 18-25 who are fluent in English and able to make in-person visits to our campus in Central New Jersey. Earn up to $120 if eligible! Email us at lemolab@princeton.edu to learn more.

Congratulations to our fearless leader and lab director @eriknook.bsky.social for being named an APS Rising Star @psychscience.bsky.social and receiving the Alies Muskin Career Development Leadership Program (CDLP) Award from @ADAA_Anxiety. We are in awe!

Members of the LEmo lab stand in a group behind a counter with various baking supplies

After a fantastic semester, a cupcake party with the LEmo-rs really is the icing on the cake! All the best with finals and enjoy the holidays!

Dr. Griffiths (left) standing next to Dr. Nook (right)

We are so excited to welcome Dr. Sarah Griffiths from UCL
as a Visiting Research Fellow! Her research examines the relationship between communication skills and mental health. She was recently awarded a grant to examine linguistic complexity in adolescent therapy conversations while here!