Congratulations @ErikNook 🎉 We are so proud!

Congratulations to @talvaldivia for being selected as a Graduate Student Fellow in Princeton’s Cognitive Science program! 🎉 As a graduate fellow, Chantal will be a central member of the Cognitive Science Program, attending and presenting in Thursday colloquium series in the fall semester, and jointly organizing departmental events.

We're looking for participants ages 18-65 to participate in a study about chronic emptiness. You must be fluent in English. If you're interested, please email us ([email protected]) with the subject line "Emptiness Study". #psychology #research #recruiting #princeton

Please join us in congratulating Steven Mesquiti for being selected as an inaugural Princeton Precision Health Graduate Fellow! 🎉 Princeton Precision Health (PPH) is a program dedicated to interdisciplinary research and education, in pursuit of improving the understanding and advancement of human health. As a graduate fellow, Steven will participate as a core member of the PPH community, sharing his ongoing work on psycholinguistics and learning new computational methods. Congratulations, Steven! Learn more about Princeton Precision Health here: pph.princeton.edu/

Congratulations to John and Daisy for wrapping up their summer research this past week with fabulous poster presentations! They spent the past couple of months investigating very interesting questions about how children’s beliefs about emotions influence their mental health, and how listening to music relates to emotional experiences. We are grateful to OURSIP and ReMatch+ for supporting their time in the lab this summer, and we can’t wait to see where they go next!

Congrats to @DanMirea4, who led a new paper published in @JAMAPsych! "The Reinforcement Effect of Social Media Likes in Depression" jamanetwork.com/journals/jam… Across 3 different Twitter datasets, we examined the effects of social media “likes” on posting behavior and their associations with depressive psychopathology. We found that greater symptoms were linked to *greater* tendency to be reinforced by likes. These results suggest that people with depression are more sensitive to positive social feedback (social reward) on social media. Given that lab studies tend to show the opposite pattern (blunted reward learning in depression), these findings reveal novel insights one can gain from analyses of naturalistic real-world behavior.

Huge congratulations to @HennaVartiainen 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! TigerWell offers grants to support innovative and impactful programs and research with a focus on promoting well-being at Princeton. Learn more about them here: tigerwell.princeton.edu/gran…

Huge congratulations to Dr. Dan Mirea (@DanMirea4) on his dissertation and defense!!! Dr. Mirea’s dissertation, “Computational Psychiatry in the Wild: Understanding Mental Health through Digital Social Behavior,” comprises a collection of studies investigating the interactions between social media and mental health, and what makes psychotherapy effective. His findings have provided the field with invaluable insights and advancements in how to study people’s mental health through their natural, “in the wild” behaviors on digital platforms. We are so proud of you and can’t wait for all the big things you continue to do! 🥳

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 to the lab!

Congratulations to @HennaVartiainen for winning the Graduate Student Teaching Award! The Department of Psychology sponsors a teaching award each year to recognize and honor a graduate student who has made significant contributes to undergraduate teaching in the Department. We are so proud of you, Henna!!

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!! 🎉

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