Publicaties

To measure emotion in daily life, studies often prompt participants to repeatedly rate their feelings on a set of prespecified terms. This approach has yielded key findings in the psychological literature yet may not represent how people typically describe their experiences. We used an alternative approach, in which participants labeled their current emotion with at least one word of their choosing. In an initial study, estimates of label ...

Self-harm-encompassing suicidality and nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI)-presents a critical public health concern, particularly as it is a major risk factor of death by suicide. Understanding the psychosocial dynamics of self-harm is imperative. Accordingly, in a large-scale, naturalistic study, we leveraged modern language analysis methods to provide a comprehensive perspective on suicidality and NSSI, specifically in the context of borderline ...

The experience of emotion is a form of meaning-making: it reveals one's relationship to the circumstances. Often, the emphasis is on the emotions explicitly named or subjective feelings conveyed. In this perspective, we argue that psychology should use a broader set of tools to study emotional meaning in language. We put forward three sets of language features that capture: the contextual features or aspects of experience salient at each moment ...

OBJECTIVES: Emotions of immigrant-origin individuals tend to resemble those of their social environment. This study examined how social networks of Turkish-origin minority adolescents, based on both majority and coethnic minority friendships (composition and structure), have bearing on their emotional fit with Belgian-majority and Turkish-minority cultures. METHOD: Turkish-origin minority adolescents (N = 668) and Belgian-majority adolescents (N ...

People vary in the precision with which they experience and report on their emotions, known as emotional granularity, and this precision predicts their ability to regulate their emotions. It is not yet known, however, whether links between emotional granularity and emotion regulation are due to variation in knowledge of emotion words-specifically, individuals' reported usage, understanding, and ability to accurately define emotion words. In the ...

Emotion regulation (ER) variability refers to how individuals vary their use of ER strategies across time. It helps individuals to meet contextual needs, underscoring its importance in well-being. The theoretical foundation of ER variability recognizes two constituent processes: strategy switching (e.g., moving from distraction to social sharing) and endorsement change (e.g., decreasing the intensity of both distraction and social sharing). ER ...

Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals' subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and ...