Assistant Professor

323 Peretsman Scully Hall

enook@princeton.edu

Ph.D., Harvard University

Curriculum Vit? (225.22 KB)

Lab Website: https://lemolab.princeton.edu/

Summary Emotions are a cornerstone of the human experience. Feelings of joy, fear, sadness, excitement, and pride are woven through our everyday experiences. Emotions guide our actions, shape our relationships, and they bring meaning to our lives and the lives of those around us. Emotions can also overwhelm us, reaching impairing levels of distress that characterize psychological disorders like anxiety and depression. I study how emotions like these "work," specifically focusing on how language and emotion interact. I integrate three primary lenses to advance understanding of how language shapes emotion: (i) a developmental approach to understand how children and adolescents learn to identify what they are feeling, (ii) a neuroscientific approach to understand how brain systems allow us to represent and regulate our emotions, and (iii) a translational approach to understand how emotions and emotional language relate to psychopathology and its treatment. As a fully trained clinical psychologist, I am ultimately interested in producing knowledge about human emotion that can improve psychological health and well-being.






Representative Publications
Erik C. Nook, Jamil Zaki; Social Norms Shift Behavioral and Neural Responses to Foods.?J Cogn Neurosci?1 July 2015; 27 (7): 1412–1426.

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Nook, E. C., Schleider, J. L., & Somerville, L. H. (2017). A linguistic signature of psychological distancing in emotion regulation.?Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(3), 337–346.

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Nook, E.C., Sasse, S.F., Lambert, H.K.?et al.?Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations.?Nat Hum Behav?1,?881–889 (2017).

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Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A., & Somerville, L. H. (2018). The Nonlinear Development of Emotion Differentiation: Granular Emotional Experience Is Low in Adolescence.?Psychological Science,?29(8), 1346–1357.

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