I am a second-year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University, where I work in Erik Nook’s Logic of Emotion Lab.
My research sits at the intersection of computer science, natural language processing, and clinical psychology. I develop and evaluate language-based tools for mental health assessment, with a focus on the psychometric validity and generalizability of such tools across demographically diverse populations. A central question motivating my work is whether linguistic markers of psychological distress are measurement-invariant — that is, whether they capture the same underlying constructs with equivalent precision across the individuals and groups to whom clinical assessments are applied.
My current work examines whether large language models predict depression and anxiety equivalently across racially and ethnically diverse clients in teletherapy, how the semantic content of first-person pronoun use in psychotherapy transcripts tracks symptom severity and treatment response, and whether domain-adapted clinical language models can reliably predict treatment outcomes.
Prior to Princeton, I was as a Lab Manager in Emily Falk’s Communication Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. I have had the privilege of collaborating with researchers including Jamie Pennebaker and people affiliated with the World Well-Being Project at the University of Pennsylvania.
My research has been supported by the Princeton University Data Driven Social Science Graduate Fellowship and the New Jersey Health Foundation.
Selected Publications
Mesquiti, S. & Nook, E.C. (2026). Large Language Models in Mental Health Treatment and Research. Annual Reviews BioMedical Data Science. DOI
Mesquiti, S., Cosme, D., Nook, E.C., Falk E.B., Burns S. (2026). Predicting Psychological and Subjective Well-being through Language-based Assessments of Well-being. Communications Psychology. DOI
Mesquiti, S., Seraj, S., Weyland, A. H., Ashokkumar, A., Boyd, R. L., Mihalcea, R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2025). Analysis of social media language reveals the psychological interaction of three successive upheavals. Scientific Reports. DOI
A complete list of publications is available on Google Scholar and in my CV.
Research Interests
- Psychometric validity and generalizability of language-based clinical assessment
- Lnguage as a transdiagnostic index of psychological distress
- Domain adaptation and evaluation of large language models for mental health
- Computational psycholinguistics and large-scale text analysis
Education
| Degree | Field | Year(s) | Institution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ph.D. | Psychology | 2024–Present | Princeton University |
| M.A. | Psychological Research | 2019–2022 | Texas State University |
| B.A. | Psychology (Minor: Spanish) | 2015–2019 | Southwestern University |