Kevin Ochsner
Kevin Ochsner is a social neuroscientist at Columbia University, where he chairs the psychology department and directs the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience laboratory. He is one of the founding figures of the research literature on cognitive reappraisal, which is the deliberate strategy of changing how you think about a situation in order to change how you feel about it. He is also senior author on the 2021 paper finding that naming an emotion makes reappraising it work worse.
Who they are
His presence on that 2021 paper is what makes it hard to dismiss. The finding that naming impedes reframing comes from inside the reappraisal literature, from the people with the most invested in emotion regulation working at all. A negative result from the camp that would least like it is the strongest kind there is.
Erik Nook is first author on the paper, and this publication credits Nook for it.
Key papers
Nook, E. C., Satpute, A. B., & Ochsner, K. N. (2021). Affective Science, 2, 187 to 198. Senior author. Naming an emotion made both reframing and mindful acceptance work less well.
Key ideas
Reappraisal is the best-evidenced deliberate strategy in emotion regulation, and he helped build that evidence. That is the background against which the 2021 result should be read.
Naming and reframing are not additive, and the order matters. His own literature is the one that loses out when they are combined.
Where a finding embarrasses the people who report it, it deserves more weight rather than less.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
Nothing confirmed. A search was run and no website or account could be tied to this person with enough certainty to publish. A name match on its own is not evidence, and a wrong link here would be worse than none.
Checked 2026-09-11. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Nook, E. C., Satpute, A. B., & Ochsner, K. N. (2021). Affective Science, 2, 187 to 198.
- Affiliation confirmed 2026-09-11 against the Columbia University Department of Psychology record.