Congratulations to John and Daisy for wrapping up their fabulous summer research on how children’s emotion beliefs influence mental health, and how music relates to emotions. We are grateful to OURSIP and ReMatch+ for supporting their time in the lab and can’t wait to see where they go next!

Congrats to @danmirea.bsky.social who led a new paper published in @jamapsychiatry.com! "The Reinforcement Effect of Social Media Likes in Depression". jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

The Reinforcement Effect of Social Media Likes in Depression

This study investigates individual differences in the effect of social media likes on posting behavior and their association with and specificity to depressive psychopathology.

jamanetwork.com

Huge congratulations to @hennavartiainen.bsky.social for winning a Princeton TigerWell grant! 🎉 Henna’s grant will support her ongoing research on how listening to music connects with emotions. We’re very excited to see what her study finds! Learn more about Princeton's TigerWell grants:

Huge congratulations to Dr. Dan Mirea (@danmirea.bsky.social) on his dissertation and defense!!! We are so proud of you and can’t wait for all the big things you continue to do! 🥳 Read more about Dr. Mirea's amazing work in this thread:

Ever wondered why we sometimes 'catch' another person's anxiety even after a brief interaction? We developed a paradigm to induce contagious anxiety and find that empathy and mental imagery mediate anxiety contagion. See thread & preprint for details! osf.io/preprints/ps...

We are thrilled to welcome Angélica Rodríguez (Ponce Health Sciences University) and AJ Cruz (The University of Texas - El Paso) to our lab for a 2-month stay through the Visiting Internship for Ph.D. Students! They'll be investigating sleep, language, emotion regulation, and mental health. Welcome!

Congratulations to @hennavartiainen.bsky.social for winning the Graduate Student Teaching Award! The Dept. of Psychology sponsors an annual teaching award to recognize a graduate student who has made significant contributes to undergraduate teaching in the Dept. We are so proud of you, Henna!!

We’re so excited to welcome Natasha Vogel, who will be joining our lab this summer as a Visiting Student Research Collaborator!

We had another fantastic end-of-year brunch and are proud of everyone! Congrats to our seniors on their fabulous theses, to our 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.bsky.social for winning a @princeton.edu 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!! 🎉

We have a new paper by @eriknook.bsky.social and Dr. Jamil Zaki published in @psychscience.bsky.social 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.

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.bsky.social

Continuing strong on Friday, come check out our four lab members giving talks and posters! @affectscience.bsky.social

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

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.bsky.social

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

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.

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: