Logic of Emotion Lab

We had a blast talking about science at Village Elementary School with a lovely group of students, and presenting some of our research. Here’s to inspiring the next generation of scientists! Thank you Village Elementary for having us!

This past weekend, we closed out fall break with a lovely day at the annual Community Fest, held by Ewing Township and The College of New Jersey! We had a fantastic time chatting with everyone about our research.
@tcnj.bsky.social

We are so excited to welcome Dr. Ryan Brown, Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University, who is joining our lab on a micro-sabbatical! Her research focuses on the role of love and loss in shaping mental and physical health across the lifespan.
@ryanlinnbrown.bsky.social
@starlabteam.bsky.social

These exciting results highlight the potential of LLM-powered linguistic analysis to detect people who are struggling with anxiety and depression. They also deepen our understanding of the interpersonal processes that support effective therapy.

LLMs can also expand beyond only analyzing client language and estimate how strongly therapists encouraged distance in their clients. Ratings also tracked changing symptoms when word-counting approaches could not!

We have a new paper published in @cpsyjournal.bsky.social! We used large-language models (LLMs) to estimate linguistic distance in psychotherapy text and found that these ratings tracked with clients’ symptoms in treatment over time, more strongly than word-counting techniques did.

These exciting results highlight the potential of LLM-powered linguistic analysis to detect people who are struggling with anxiety and depression. They also deepen our understanding of the interpersonal processes that support effective therapy.

LLMs can also expand beyond only analyzing client language and also estimate how strongly therapists encouraged distance in their clients. Ratings also tracked changing symptoms when word-counting approaches could not!

The academic year has officially begun! Looking forward to a fantastic Fall semester together! 😄

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!!!