Kristen A Lindquist

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Department of Psychology

Adolescents experience significant growth in social cognition, including perspective taking and identity formation. Due to the salience of race and ethnicity in the United States, adolescents’ ethnic–racial identity (ERI) may have important implications for their sociocognitive development. The present study tested the association between ERI in ea...

Humans no doubt use language to communicate about their emotional experiences, but does language in turn help humans understand emotions, or is language just a vehicle of communication? This study used a form of artificial intelligence (AI) known as large language models (LLMs) to assess whether language-based representations of emotion causally co...

Adolescents’ experiences with social media are complex and can impact their mental well-being differently. Our study aimed to understand how neurobiological sensitivities may moderate the association between different social media experiences and depressive symptoms. In a multi-wave study, 80 adolescents (Mage = 13.06, SD = .58) took part in an fMR...

Individuals befriend others who are similar to them. One important source of similarity in relationships is similarity in felt emotion. In the present study, we used novel methods to assess whether greater similarity in the multivoxel brain representation of affective stimuli was associated with adolescents’ proximity within real-world school-based...

We begin this chapter by clarifying our working definition of interoception and discussing how interoception fits within the larger picture of human brain functional evolution. We focus on the role of interoception in supporting the predictive regulation of the internal milieu, or “allostasis,” and situate this process within human phylogeny (evolu...

Growing evidence suggests that social contexts may prompt qualitatively distinct experiences of emotions than nonsocial contexts. In this study of people’s naturalistic daily emotional experiences, we examined in adults with and without major depressive disorder (MDD) whether experiencing emotions in a social context (with others) versus nonsocial...

signed to help people become more aware of their own emotions, facilitating emotional self-regulation processes in their daily lives. The app was evaluated in a study with 16 participants. They used the app five times a day for two weeks. The aim was to improve emotional management, emotional granularity and perception of emotional intensity. A mix...

Adolescents' perceptions of parent and peer norms about externalizing behaviors influence the extent to which they adopt similar attitudes, yet little is known about how the trajectories of perceived parent and peer norms are related to trajectories of personal attitudes across adolescence. Neural development of midline regions implicated in self–o...

Introduction It is often assumed that the ability to recognize the emotions of others is reflexive and automatic, driven only by observable facial muscle configurations. However, research suggests that accumulated emotion concept knowledge shapes the way people perceive the emotional meaning of others’ facial muscle movements. Cultural upbringing c...

Addiction-like social media use (ASMU) is widely reported among adolescents and is associated with depression and other negative health outcomes. We aimed to identify developmental trajectories of neural social feedback processing that are linked to higher levels of ASMU in later adolescence. Within a longitudinal design, 103 adolescents completed...

Adolescents’ peer world is highly dynamic with constant dissolution of old friendships and formation of new ones. Though many of adolescents’ risky decisions involve their peers, little is known about how adolescents’ ever-changing friendships shape their ability to make these peer-involving risky decisions, particularly adaptive ones, and whether...

Social media behaviors increase during adolescence, and quantifiable feedback metrics (e.g., likes, followers) may amplify the value of social status for teens. Social media’s impact on adolescents’ daily affect may be exacerbated given the neurodevelopmental changes that increase youths’ sensitivity to socio-emotional information. This study exami...

In the current study, we combined sociometric nominations and neuroimaging techniques to examine adolescents’ neural tracking of peers from their real-world social network that varied in social preferences and popularity. Adolescent participants from an entire school district (N = 873) completed peer sociometric nominations of their grade at school...

Adolescents are particularly attuned to popularity within peer groups, which impacts behaviors such as risk-taking and prosocial behavior. Neurodevelopmental changes orient adolescents toward salient social cues in their environment. We examined whether neural regions that track popularity are associated with longitudinal changes in risk-taking and...

Growing work suggests that interoception, that is, representations of one’s internal bodily changes, plays a role in shaping emotional experiences. Past studies primarily examine how behavioral accuracy in detecting interoceptive signals (interoceptive ability) relates to emotional states, with less work examining self-reported interoceptive facets...

Unlabelled: Emotion differentiation (ED) - the tendency to experience one's emotions with specificity - is a well-established predictor of adaptive responses to daily life stress. Yet, there is little research testing the role of ED in self-reported and physiological responses to an acute stressor. In the current study, we investigate the effects...

Adolescence is marked by increased peer influence on risk taking; however, recent literature suggests enormous individual variation in peer influence susceptibility to risk-taking behaviors. The current study uses representation similarity analysis to test whether neural similarity between decision-making for self and peers (i.e., best friends) in...

"Sickness behavior" is an orchestrated suite of symptoms that commonly occur in the context of inflammation, and is characterized by changes in affect, social experience, and behavior. However, recent evidence suggests that inflammation may not always produce the same set of sickness behavior (e.g., fatigue, anhedonia, and social withdrawal). Rathe...

Background: Habenula (HB) function is implicated in substance use disorders and is involved in inhibiting dopamine release in the ventral striatum (VS). While blunted VS reward-responsivity is implicated in risk for later substance use, links between HB reinforcement processing and progression of use has not been examined among adolescents. In the...

Social judgments—that others are kind or cruel, well intentioned, or conniving—can ease or disrupt social interactions. And yet a person's internal state can alter these judgments—a phenomenon known as affective realism. We examined the factors that contribute to, and mitigate, affective realism during a stressful interview. Using data collected be...

Research questions in the human sciences often seek to answer if and when a process changes across time. In functional MRI studies, for instance, researchers may seek to assess the onset of a shift in brain state. For daily diary studies, the researcher may seek to identify when a person's psychological process shifts following treatment. The timin...

One feature of adolescence is a rise in risk-taking behaviors, whereby the consequences of adolescents' risky action often impact their immediate surrounding such as their peers and parents (vicarious risk taking). Yet, little is known about how vicarious risk taking develops, particularly depending on who the risk affects and the type of risky beh...

Humans no doubt use language to communicate about their emotional experiences, but does language in turn help humans understand emotions, or is language just a vehicle of communication? This study used a form of artificial intelligence (AI) known as large language models (LLMs) to assess whether language-based representations of emotion causally co...

Thirty years of neuroimaging reveal the set of brain regions consistently associated with pleasant and unpleasant affect in humans—or the neural reference space for valence. Yet some of humans’ most potent affective states occur in the context of other humans. Prior work has yet to differentiate how the neural reference space for valence varies as...

Importance: Social media platforms provide adolescents with unprecedented opportunities for social interactions during a critical developmental period when the brain is especially sensitive to social feedback. Objective: To explore how adolescents' frequency of checking behaviors on social media platforms is associated with longitudinal changes...

A central goal of linguistics is to understand how words evolve. Past research has found that macro-level factors such as frequency of word usage and population size explain the pace of lexical evolution. Here we focus on cognitive and affective factors, testing whether valence (positivity–negativity) explains lexical evolution rates. Using estimat...

Not all adolescents are equally susceptible to peer influence, and for some, peer influence exerts positive rather than negative effects. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, the current study examined how intrinsic functional connectivity networks associated with processing social cognitive and affective stimuli predict adole...

Background Rates of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) increase dramatically in adolescence. Affective reactivity and adverse social experiences have been linked to NSSI, but it is less known whether these factors may separately or interactively predict NSSI, especially longitudinally. This study combined fMRI and a sociometric measure to test whether...

Experiences within one's social environment shape neural sensitivity to threatening and rewarding social cues. However, in racialized societies like the U.S., youth from minoritized racial/ethnic backgrounds can have different experiences and perceptions within neighborhoods that share similar characteristics. The current study examined how neighbo...

Many prosocial behaviors involve social risks such as speaking out against a popular opinion, bias, group norm, or authority. However, little is known about whether adolescents’ prosocial tendencies develop over time with their perceptions of social risks. This accelerated longitudinal study used within‐subject growth‐curve analyses to test the lin...

Scholarly debates about the nature of human emotion traditionally pit biological and cultural influences against one another. Although many existing theories acknowledge the role of culture, they mostly treat emotion categories such as ‘anger’ as biological products. In this Perspective, we summarize traditional assumptions about the roles of biolo...

Psychology is a popular subject to study, with thousands entering graduate school each year, but unlike med or pre-law, there is limited information available to help students learn about the field, how to successfully apply, and how to thrive while completing doctoral work. The Portable Mentor is a useful, must-have resource for all students inter...

This study examines associations between adolescents’ positive risk taking and neural activation during risky decision-making. Participants included 144 adolescents ages 13-16 years (Mage = 14.23; SDage = 0.7) from diverse racial and ethnic groups. Participants self-reported their engagement in positive and negative risk taking. Additionally, parti...

Longstanding evidence finds that healthy older adults tend to experience greater positivity, equanimity, and well-being in daily life. Prominent psychological theories of emotional aging tend to focus on cognitive pathways such as shifting motivations and accumulated cognitive resources (e.g., attentional control, expertise) to explain observed emo...

Past research has recognized culture and gender variation in the experience of emotion, yet this has not been examined on a level of effective connectivity. To determine culture and gender differences in effective connectivity during emotional experiences, we applied dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to electroencephalography (EEG) measures of brain ac...

In the present study, we used an unsupervised classification algorithm to reveal both consistency and degeneracy in neural network connectivity during anger and anxiety. Degeneracy refers to the ability of different biological pathways to produce the same outcomes (Edelman & Gally, 2001; Tononi et al., 1999). Previous research is suggestive of dege...

Social judgments—that others are kind or cruel, well-intentioned or conniving—can ease or disrupt social interactions. And yet a person’s internal state can alter these judgments—a phenomenon known as affective realism. We examined the factors that contribute to, and mitigate, affective realism during a stressful interview. We hypothesized and foun...

Growing work suggests that interoception, i.e., representations of one’s internal bodily changes, plays a role in shaping emotional experiences. Past studies primarily examine how behavioral accuracy in detecting interoceptive signals (interoceptive ability) relates to emotion, with less work examining self-reported interoceptive facets such as the...

How does implicit bias contribute to explicit prejudice? Prior experiments show that concept knowledge about fear versus sympathy determines whether negative affect (captured as implicit bias) predicts antisocial outcomes (Lee et al.). Concept knowledge (i.e., beliefs) about groups may similarly moderate the link between implicitly measured negativ...

Background The allostatic interoceptive network (AIN) has been proposed as central to linking interoceptive processing and autonomic regulation and involved in emotional experience. Early pathologic changes in AD occur in hubs of the AIN, and changes in emotional reactivity have been identified at both the MCI and dementia stages of Alzheimer’s dis...

As humans, we face a variety of social stressors on a regular basis. Given the established role of social stress in influencing physical and psychological functioning, researchers have focused immense efforts on understanding the psychological and physiological changes induced by exposure to acute social stressors. With the advancement of functiona...

According to a constructionist model of emotion, conceptual knowledge plays a foundational role in emotion perception; reduced availability of relevant conceptual knowledge should therefore impair emotion perception. Conceptual deficits can follow both degradation of semantic knowledge (e.g., semantic ‘storage’ deficits in semantic dementia) and de...

Adolescence represents a period of risk for developing patterns of risk-taking and conduct problems, and the quality of the family environment is one robust predictor of such externalizing behavior. However, family factors may not affect all youth uniformly, and individual differences in neurobiological susceptibility to the family context may mode...

Purpose Adolescents are among the most frequent users of social media and are highly attuned to social feedback. However, digital stress, or subjective distress related to social media demands, expectations, and others’ approval and judgment, is understudied in adolescents. Methods We conducted a preliminary investigation of self-reported digital...

Social judgments—that others are kind or cruel, well-intentioned or conniving—can ease or disrupt social interactions. And yet a person’s internal state can color these judgments—a phenomenon known as affective realism. We examined the factors that contribute to, and mitigate, affective realism during a stressful interview. We hypothesized and foun...

Exposure to early adversity has been linked to variations in emotional functioning. To date, however, the precise nature of these variations has been difficult to pinpoint given widespread differences in the ways in which aspects of emotional functioning are defined and measured. Here, more consistent with models of emotional functioning in typical...

A central goal of linguistics is to understand how words evolve over time, and how geographic, demographic, and cognitive variables have influenced this process of evolution. Whereas past research has focused on how macro-level factors like frequency of word usage and borrowing impact lexical evolution, we draw on insights from cognitive and affect...

Objective The degree to which adolescent social media use is associated with depressive symptoms has been the source of considerable debate. Prior studies have been limited by a reliance on cross-sectional data and measures of overall “screen time.” This study examines prospective associations between adolescents’ emotional responses to social medi...

Situated models of emotion hypothesize that emotions are optimized for the context at hand, but most neuroimaging approaches ignore context. For the first time, we applied Granger causality (GC) analysis to determine how an emotion is affected by a person's cultural background and situation. Electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were taken from...

According to a constructionist model of emotion, conceptual knowledge plays a foundational role in emotion perception; reduced availability of relevant conceptual knowledge should therefore impair emotion perception. Conceptual deficits can follow both degradation of semantic knowledge (e.g., semantic ‘storage’ deficits in semantic dementia) and de...

Recent mechanistic models of cognitive control define the normative level of control deployment as a function of the effort cost of exerting control balanced against the reward that can be attained by exerting control. Despite these models explaining empirical findings in adults, prior literature has suggested that adolescents may not adaptively in...

Objective: Beta-adrenergic receptor signaling, a critical mediator of sympathetic nervous system influences on physiology and behavior, has long been proposed as one contributor to subjective stress. Yet prior findings are surprisingly mixed about whether beta-blockade (e.g., propranolol) blunts subjective stress, with many studies reporting no eff...

Adolescence is marked by changes in decision-making and perspective-taking abilities. Although adolescents make more adaptive decisions with age, little is understood about how adolescents make adaptive decisions that impact others and how this behavior changes developmentally. Functional coupling between reward (e.g., VS) and “social brain” (e.g.,...

Objective: The degree to which adolescent social media use is associated with depressive symptoms has been the source of considerable debate. Prior studies have been limited by a reliance on cross-sectional data and measures of overall “screen time.” This study examines prospective associations between adolescents’ emotional responses to social med...

What is the relationship between language and emotion? The work that fills the pages of this special issue draws from interdisciplinary domains to weigh in on the relationship between language and emotion in semantics, cross-linguistic experience, development, emotion perception, emotion experience and regulation, and neural representation. These i...

Roughly twenty years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural correlates underlying engagement in social cognition (e.g., empathy, emotion perception) about targets spanning various social categories (e.g., race, gender). Yet findings from individual studies remain mixed. In the present quantitative funct...

Roughly twenty years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural correlates underlying engagement in social cognition (e.g., empathy, emotion perception) about targets spanning various social categories (e.g., race, gender). Yet findings from individual studies remain mixed. In the present quantitative funct...

Humans have been using language for millennia, but we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what natural language can tell us about the mind. Here we propose that language offers a unique window into psychology. After briefly summarizing the legacy of language analyses in psychological science, we show how methodological advances have made...

What role does language play in emotion? Behavioral research shows that emotion words such as “anger” and “fear” alter emotion experience, but questions still remain about mechanism. Here, we review the neuroscience literature to examine whether neural processes associated with semantics are also involved in emotion. Our review suggests that brain...

Background Influential theories predict that antidepressant medication and psychological therapies evoke distinct neural changes. Aims To test the convergence and divergence of antidepressant- and psychotherapy-evoked neural changes, and their overlap with the brain's affect network. Method We employed a quantitative synthesis of three meta-analy...

Access to words used to label emotion concepts (e.g., “disgust”) facilitates perceptions of facial muscle movements as instances of specific emotions (see Lindquist & Gendron, 2013). However, it remains unclear whether the effect of language on emotion perception is unique or whether it is driven by language’s tendency to evoke situational context....

The goal of this study is to investigate the neural basis of gender difference in emotion processing. Elec- troencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded when the same set of emotion-eliciting images was shown to male and female participants. Neural connections were estimated using Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) and results for both genders were comp...

Scientists can and should critically examine the dynamics of, and biases within, their own fields. However, AlShebli and colleagues’ (2020) publication neither advances scientific knowledge nor makes empirically justified recommendations in their recent analysis of the citation rates of 3 million unique senior-junior scientist co-author pairs. The...

Although peer influence is a strong predictor of adolescents' risk-taking behaviors, not all adolescents are susceptible to their peer group. One hundred and thirty-six adolescents (Mage = 12.79 years) completed an fMRI scan, measures of perceived peer group norms, and engagement in risky behavior. Ventral striatum (VS) sensitivity when anticipatin...

Emotion is an important psychological facet of user experience, despite receiving comparatively less attention than cognitive facets such as working memory and attention. However, emotion is also known to vary with individual differences, including cultural background. To further corroborate findings of culture-driven differences in emotion process...

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we c...

We report the first functional neuroimaging meta-analysis on age-related differences in adult neural activity during affect. We identified and coded experimental contrasts from 27 studies (published 1997-2018) with 490 older adults (55-87 years, Mage=69 years) and 470 younger adults (18-39 years, Mage =24 years). Using multilevel kernel density ana...

Humans have been using language for thousands of years, but psychologists seldom consider what natural language can tell us about the mind. Here we propose that language offers a unique window into human cognition. After briefly summarizing the legacy of language analyses in psychological science, we show how methodological advances have made these...

Humans have been using language for thousands of years, but psychologists seldom consider what natural language can tell us about the mind. Here we propose that language offers a unique window into human cognition. After briefly summarizing the legacy of language analyses in psychological science, we show how methodological advances have made these...

Objective: This study examined characteristics of online-only friendships among suicidal and non-suicidal adolescents. In addition, the extent to which adolescents’ online-only friendships may offer a protective function, buffering the effects of peer stressors (i.e., friendship stress, relational victimization) on prospective suicidal ideation, wa...

Ruba and Repacholi (2019) review an important debate in the emotion development literature: whether infants can perceive and understand facial configurations as instances of discrete emotion categories. Consistent with a psychological constructionist account (Lindquist & Gendron, 2013; Shablack & Lindquist, 2019), they conclude that infants can per...

Understanding emotion words is vital to understanding, regulating, and communicating one's emotions. Yet, little work examines how emotion words are acquired by children. Previous research in linguistics suggests that children use the sentence frame in which a novel word is presented to home in on the meaning of that word, in conjunction with situa...