Speakers
Thursday, March 21
5:00-6:15PM
Feel-better tech: Developing AI tools to support mental health
Derrick Hull
Slingshot
How to Make GenAI Safe and Beneficial for Mental Health
Generative AI is rapidly entering the mental health ecosystem, offering new ways to deliver support, enhance access, and personalize care, but it also raises novel risks. We outline a framework for making GenAI safe, effective, and beneficial in mental health contexts by aligning product and machine learning design with evidence and human guidance. We find that when this framework is followed, GenAI demonstrates completely different capacities and outcomes. For example, GenAI becomes pro-human, increasing user engagement with the people in their lives, helping them become more active, not less, and are more sensitive to user vulnerabilities and behave more cautiously than general purpose AI. We also see improved hope and goal attainment, reductions in depression and anxiety, and indications that users carry the AI with them after intervention.
Friday, March 13
1:30-2:30PM
The ties that bond: Interpersonal affect and human relationships
Shir Atzil
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Social Physiology: The Metabolic Roots of Human Bonding
Energy efficiency is a foundational principle of evolution, shaping both physiology and behavior across species. In living organisms, adaptations that optimize metabolic efficiency are favored. This raises a central paradox: if evolution prizes efficiency, why has sociality, one of the most energetically demanding behaviors, been so strongly selected? What makes social connection so biologically indispensable?
This talk introduces a unifying principle in human physiology: Social Physiology, which posits that the physiology of social animals functions more efficiently together. Across homeostatic systems, including glucose metabolism, thermoregulation, and sympathetic arousal, and across different types of bonds, I will show that physiological processes operate more efficiently in a social context compared to alone, producing measurable social physiological gains.
Social Physiology shifts our understanding of the biological benefits of sociality, suggesting that humans seek companionship not only for protection and reproduction, but also for enhanced physiology. From an evolutionary perspective, by enhancing metabolic efficiency, Social Physiology may have contributed to the emergence and maintenance of sociality.
Tristen Inagaki
San Diego State University
Warm-Pressure Enhances Social Connection
From the embrace of a dear friend to the warm squeeze of a hand, social touch can strengthen social connection. Yet, the sensory factors and neural mechanisms that determine the affective experience of social touch are unknown. Based on animal models of the contribution of thermoregulatory processes to social connection and theories highlighting bodily afferent feedback as drivers of psychological experience, the current talk presents evidence for the influence of two components of social touch on social connection: temperature and pressure. In within-subject experiments, the combination of warm deeper pressure increased feelings of social connection toward close others compared to warmth or pressure alone. Effects were stronger for those higher in interoceptive sensibility. Further, neural activity in regions previously related to social connection, emotion, and sensory processing (i.e., ventral striatum, mid-insula) was higher and showed greater connectivity in response to warm pressure, but only when presented in the context of close others. Warm-pressure, characteristic features of intimate social touch behaviors, therefore, uniquely increase social connection and associated neural activity toward close others. Results suggest a novel sensory-affective pathway underlying social connection with implications for clinical outcomes with comorbid sensory and social connection disruptions.
Saturday, March 14
11:15AM-12:15PM
Use your words? The role of language in understanding, developing, and regulating emotions
Erik Nook
Princeton University
Words for wellbeing: how language shapes emotion regulation and psychotherapy outcomes
Managing our emotions is key to wellbeing. In this talk, I’ll present a series of studies demonstrating that the words we use can both reflect and affect how we regulate emotions, and in turn are related to mental health. In laboratory studies, we’ve found that cognitive reappraisal efficacy is related to using more ‘distant’ language, that labeling our emotions is surprisingly associated with less effective reappraisal, and merely speaking reinterpretations out loud (rather than silently thinking them) boosts reappraisal success. We have begun to translate these findings and investigate what linguistic patterns track mental health outcomes in a real-world corpus of psychotherapy transcripts from more than 6,000 participants. In line with experimental data, clients distance their language over time in treatment (referring to themselves and the present moment less), and this shift tracks symptom changes. Ongoing and future analyses in this dataset will also be discussed. In all, my lab is tracing the connections between our words, our feelings, and our mental health, offering new avenues for detecting and intervening on wellbeing using language alone.
Catherine Sandhofer
University of California, Los Angeles
How Children Learn Emotion Concepts: The Role of Emotion Words
Emotions are abstract categories whose instances vary widely across faces, bodies, voices, and contexts. For young children, this variability makes emotion concepts difficult to learn. Drawing on decades of research on language and category learning, I examine how emotion words help children identify the deeper regularities across varied emotional events. Across several studies, my colleagues and I find that explicit, specific emotion labels reliably support children’s ability to organize heterogeneous emotional experiences into more coherent categories. These patterns align with mechanisms proposed in broader category-learning research, in which labels can draw on prior semantic knowledge, guide attention toward features informative for category structure, and help learners consolidate disparate instances into a single labeled concept. Ongoing work examines how both the emotion language children hear and the vocabulary they themselves produce contribute to the developing structure of these concepts. Taken together, this work illustrates how language can serve as a mechanism for building abstract representations of emotion in early childhood.
Maria Heim
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Language and Emotion: Learning from Ancient and Classical India
I work in the humanities on languages and intellectual systems from ancient and classical India. My paper brings to the discussion several insights I have learned from premodern Indian reflection on emotion and the philosophy of language. First, emotions are not pre-given fixtures of the world but are constituted in an ecological way by contexts, previous experience, the body, and language. Second, emotion words are perhaps best seen to aim at particulars, not universals or essences. Third, emotion terms are both descriptive and constitutive of emotions; since they help create the experiences they describe, learning new words can mean gaining new experiences. Finally, Indian thinkers loved lists of emotions, but were not interested in reductive listings of basic emotions or essences. Rather, they deployed lists analytically to generate nearly infinite varieties and combinations of phenomena to begin to get at the complexity and variation of our affective experience.