I am a clinical psychologist interested in how people understand and interpret their
own and others’ emotional experiences. My research conceptualizes affect labeling
as a perceptual decision-making process. Building on perceptual theories of
emotion, I propose that labeling an emotion emerges through the accumulation of
emotional evidence - from cognitive appraisals, bodily sensations, action tendencies,
and expressive cues - until this evidence reaches a decision threshold that enables a
person to select an emotional label. Using sequential sampling models, I examine
the latent mechanisms that govern this evidence-accumulation process and the ways
individual differences shape it.

In my PhD work at Ben-Gurion University, I tested this conceptualization empirically
by examining how people generate emotion labels and how errors in labeling can be
understood similarly to perceptual errors. I also explored sex differences in the
process of labeling negative emotions. I then expanded this line of research during
my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where I investigated differences
between self-labeling and norm-labeling.

In my current postdoctoral research, conducted jointly with Prof. Anat Perry (the
Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the Hebrew University) and Dr. Casey Brown
(the CARES Lab at Georgetown University), I extend this framework to the
interpersonal domain. Specifically, I study empathic accuracy as a process of
labeling others’ emotions and examine how alexithymia influences both self- and
other-directed emotional processes.

 

Publications:

Givon, E., Meiran, N., & Goldenberg, A. (2025). The Process of Affect Labeling.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Givon, E., Berkovich, R., Oz-Cohen, E., Rubinstein, K., Singer-Landau, E.,
Udelsman-Danieli, G., & Meiran, N. (2023). Are Women Truly “More Emotional” than
Men? Sex Differences in an Indirect Model-Based Measure of Emotional Feelings.
Current Psychology, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04227-z

Givon, E. & Danieli, G., Almagor, O., Fekete, T., Shriki, O., Meiran, N. (2022). Can
Feelings “Feel” Wrong? Similarities between Counter-Normative Emotion Reports
and Perceptual Errors. Psychological Science, 33(6), 948-956.
https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211063915

Givon, E., Itzhak-Raz, A., Karmon-Presser, A., Danieli, G., & Meiran, N. (2020). How
does the emotional experience evolve? Feeling generation as evidence
accumulation. Emotion, 20(2), 271. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000537