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Nook, Erik

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Nook

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Nook, Erik
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.489ec04a-8ddb-4d88-acf7-5979c333fcd9

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    Weak dorsolateral prefrontal response to social criticism predicts worsened mood and symptoms following social conflict in people at familial risk for schizophrenia
    (Elsevier, 2018) Nook, Erik; Dodell-Feder, David; Germine, Laura; Hooley, Jill; DeLisi, Lynn; Hooker, Christine I.
    Understanding the specific mechanisms that explain why people who have relatives with schizophrenia (i.e., people at familial high risk; FHR) are more likely to develop the disorder is crucial for prevention. We investigated a diathesis-stress model of familial risk by testing whether FHR individuals under-recruit brain regions central to emotion regulation when exposed to social conflict, resulting in worse mood and symptoms following conflict. FHR and non-FHR participants listened to critical, neutral, and praising comments in an fMRI scanner before completing 4 weeks of daily-diary records. Compared to non-FHR individuals, FHR individuals under-recruited the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)—a region strongly implicated in cognitive emotion regulation—following criticism. Furthermore, within FHR participants, weak DLPFC response to criticism in the laboratory task was associated with elevated negative mood and positive symptoms on days with distressing social conflicts in daily-diary assessments. Results extend diathesis-stress models of schizophrenia by clarifying neural and environmental pathways to dysregulation in FHR individuals.
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    Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations
    (2017) Nook, Erik; Sasse, Stephanie F.; Lambert, Hilary K.; McLaughlin, Katie A.; Somerville, Leah
    How do people represent their own and others’ emotional experiences? Contemporary emotion theories and growing evidence suggest that the conceptual representation of emotion plays a central role in how people understand the emotions both they and other people feel.1–6 Although decades of research indicate that adults typically represent emotion concepts as multidimensional, with valence (positive—negative) and arousal (activating—deactivating) as two primary dimensions,7–10 little is known about how this bidimensional (or circumplex) representation arises.11 Here we show that emotion representations develop from a monodimensional focus on valence to a bidimensional focus on both valence and arousal from age 6 to age 25. We investigated potential mechanisms underlying this effect and found that increasing verbal knowledge mediated emotion representation development over and above three other potential mediators: (i) fluid reasoning, (ii) the general ability to represent non-emotional stimuli bidimensionally, and (iii) task-related behaviors (e.g., using extreme ends of rating scales). These results suggest that verbal development facilitates the expansion of emotion concept representations (and potentially emotional experiences) from a “positive or negative” dichotomy in childhood to a multidimensional organization in adulthood.