Logic of Emotion Lab

We’re so excited to welcome Natasha Vogel, who will be joining our lab as a Visiting Student Research Collaborator for the summer! Natasha is a 2nd-year PhD student from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her research examines how cognitive processes and language shape emotion regulation strategy selection and effectiveness in children and adolescents. She is also interested in how youth identify and regulate co-occurring emotions. As part of her collaboration with the LEmo Lab, Natasha will use topic modeling to examine youth's definitions of different emotions. Welcome, Natasha!!

We had another fantastic end-of-year brunch and are feeling proud of everyone's excellent work! Huge congratulations to our fabulous seniors for all their outstanding work on their theses, to our hardworking juniors for their project proposals, and to the rest of our team for their incredible progress and contributions. We’re so excited to see what’s next in store for you all!

We are so proud of @claire_whiting for winning a @PrincetonGrad Graduate Teaching Award! The award is presented to 10 graduate students each year in recognition of their exceptional skill, dedication, and impact as instructors. Congrats, Claire!! 🎉

You can check out the paper here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21…

This contemporary framework highlights the multifaceted nature of empathy and challenges historical “more-is-better” models of empathy, which emerging evidence indicates can interfere with therapeutic goals in some settings. Importantly, our model adds nuance to classic clinical science intuitions about empathy and reveals new directions for clinical research, training, and practice.

We have a new paper by @ErikNook and @zakijam @PsychScience Clinical Psych Science! In this paper, we propose a “therapeutic emotional circuit” model in which emotions flow back and forth between therapist and client via empathy.

We had an amazing time listening to our lab’s fantastic speakers at SAS 2026! @ErikNook @talvaldivia @HennaVartiainen @claire_whiting Faustine Courbani

We are so proud of our lab’s poster presenters at SAS 2026! Join us in congratulating them on their hard work and accomplishments! @talvaldivia @smesquiti.bsky.social Emily Huang, and our amazing undergrad thesis students: Shauna Contreras, Siena Edwards, Emi Yun, and Aysu Türkay!

Last but not least, on Saturday we have a fantastic lineup of speakers to close out SAS weekend. Hope to see you at SAS! @affectScience

Continuing strong on Friday, come check out our four lab members giving talks and posters! @affectScience

Later in the day on Thursday, we also have four amazing posters at Poster Session I. @affectScience

We're excited about SAS 2026! Mark your calendars to check out our lab's latest work. Beginning with the Thursday preconferences, we have two lab members presenting at the Dev Precon and the Clinical Precon! @affectScience

🚨🚨 My lab is hiring a Postdoc! 🚨🚨 Postdoc opening in my lab at Harvard Psych (start: Summer/Fall 2026) We study identity, group dynamics, language, & politics. Rolling review begins 3/14 Apply: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15806 Please repost + tag folks who might be a good fit!👇

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!

Halloween may be officially over, but our spOoOooky party spirit isn’t! #Halloween2025

This past weekend, we closed out fall break with a lovely day at the annual Community Fest, held by @Ewingnj township and @TCNJ! We had a fantastic time chatting with everyone about our research.

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

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 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!

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