Emotion regulation - the set of strategies people can use to influence how they feel - is critical to mental health and well-being. One helpful strategy for regulating emotions is called cognitive reappraisal, which involves rethinking the meaning of a situation to change how it makes us feel. Given that thought and language are tightly connected, our lab seeks to understand how people can use language to best facilitate reappraisal. In one line of research, we've found that people spontaneously distance their language when they use cognitive reappraisal, and people who distance their language more strongly are more successful at regulating their emotions (Nook, Schleider, & Somerville, 2017). Linguistic distancing means reducing pronouns that refer to oneself (e.g., "I") and verbs that refer to the present moment (i.e., present-tense verbs).  In other words, successfully changing how you feel involves using language to "take a step back" from oneself and the present moment.  Interestingly, a developmental study of this effect showed that it is stable as early as age 10 (Nook*, Vidal Bustamante*, Cho, & Somerville, 2020). Finally, we have translated this research into clinical settings by testing how linguistic distancing relates to psychotherapy outcomes. We've found that we can measure how depressed and anxious someone is (and how well they're doing in treatment) merely by examining the distance in their language (Nook, Hull, Nock, & Somerville, 2022). We have also used other language-based techniques like topic modeling to identify individuals online who are thinking about suicide from their language alone (Franz, Nook, Mair, & Nock, 2020). In the future, our lab plans to study how context influences the relationship between linguistic distancing and emotion regulation, how linguistic processes beyond distancing relate to emotion regulation and clinical outcomes, and how people use language to regulate each others' emotions.

People often ask children to "use their words" to talk about how they feel.  Although a growing body of research suggests that being able to use words to label feelings is helpful, we still know relatively little about what emotion words children know and how they learn what these words mean. Our lab is working to understand the basic building blocks of emotion development. Using a novel interview for assessing what emotion words children and adolescents know, we found that children were rapidly learning new emotion words up until about age 11 (Nook, Stavish et al., 2020). We have also used this interview and other behavioral tasks to study how the meanings of emotion words change across age. In more technical words, how do the concepts underlying emotion words develop with age? These studies have shown that children primarily understand emotions in terms of valence (i.e., positivity vs negativity), and their emotion concepts become more multidimensional as their vocabulary increases (Nook, Sasse, Lambert, McLaughlin, & Somerville, 2017). Additionally, people learn to see emotions with higher levels of abstraction as they progress through childhood and adolescence (Nook, Stavish et al., 2020). However, not all development is linear: Adolescents actually tend to have greater difficulty specifically identifying what they feel (a skill called emotion differentiation) compared to both children and adults, and this is because adolescents are more likely to experience multiple emotions simultaneously compared to children (Nook, Sasse, Lambert, McLaughlin, & Somerville, 2018). In fact, an intensive longitudinal study of 30 adolescent girls showed that having low emotion differentiation increases susceptibility to stress-related anxiety and depression (Nook, Flournoy, Rodman, Mair, & McLaughlin, 2021). These studies begin to shed light on how emotion concepts and emotion language develop, which we believe is crucial to understanding both how people of different ages experience emotions and how emotions go awry across development (Nook, 2021; Nook & Somerville, 2019). Our lab's future work in this area aims to clarify how developing emotion concepts relate to emotion regulation and mental health, as well as the neural development that underlies these emotional processes.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have made substantial progress in understanding how our brains produce emotional experiences, emotion-driven behaviors, and an understanding of what emotions other people are feeling. However, many open questions remain, and our lab is particularly interested in identifying how language might shape the neural representation of our own and others' emotion. In tightly-controlled fMRI studies, we have found that how people use words to categorize both their own and others' emotions shapes the neural representation of those emotions (Satpute, Nook et al., 2016). For example, people who tend to categorize facial expressions that are "medium afraid" as "afraid" have an increase in their amygdala and insula activity, as if their brains are treating that expression as expressing fear. How we categorize our own and others' emotions shifts neural responses to those emotions, and additional analyses showed that this process unfolds through interactions between the amygdala, insula, and cortical regions thought to play a role in conceptualization. Future research in the lab is focused on further understanding how language shapes emotion representation by testing (i) whether people differ in how specifically their brains represent their own and others' emotions, and (ii) how our brains track surprising transitions in others' emotional expressions.

People exert enormous influence on each other. Social psychologists have long known that people are attuned to group behaviors and will readily conform to social norms.  However, countless questions remain regarding how social norms influence emotional experiences. We have found that basic reward-learning neural mechanisms might underlie people's tendency to conform to group norms (Nook & Zaki, 2015). Interestingly, this study investigated how people conform to group norms regarding food preferences, suggesting that even one's affective responses to foods can be shaped by social norms. We extended this framework to understand how social norms might relate to another key affective process: empathy. Empathy is key for social relationships, clinical practice, and prosocial behavior. In a series of studies, we found that people not only reported feeling more empathy for homeless people when they were in a highly empathic group of peers, they also donated more to homeless shelters if their group had a strong empathic norm (Nook, Ong, Morelli, Mitchell, & Zaki, 2016). Thus these studies show that social norms are powerful forces for guiding both affect and behavior. The lab is currently extending these paradigms to other emotions that have direct translational potential. For example, we are studying how worries spread through social networks and what interventions might block the contagious spread of anxiety.