Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
Pfeifer, V. A., Naffah, A. G., & Mehl, M. R. (2025). Feel Flows: Language Use Patterns in the Lyrics of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. Psychology of Music. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356251342808
Pfeifer, V. A., Jordan, K., Davis, T. Grilli, M. D., & Mehl, M. R. (2025). Younger and older adults’ aging well construals: A word quantitative use and topics comparison. Gerontology. https://doi.org/10.1159/000545481
Naffah, A., Pfeifer, V. A., & Mehl, M. (2025). Spoken language analysis in aging research: The validity of AI-generated speech-to-text using OpenAI’s Whisper. Gerontology. https://doi.org/10.1159/000545244
Pfeifer, V. A., Mehl, M., & Lai, V. T. (2025). Impact of language background and self-construal on verbal irony interpretation in Spanish-English Bilinguals. Journal of Language and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X241313477
Tidwell, C. A.*, Danvers, A.*, Pfeifer, V.*, Abel, D. B., Alisic, E., Beer, A., Bierstetel, S. J., Bollich-Ziegler, K. L., Bruni, M., Calabrese, W. R., Chiarello, C., Demiray, B., Dimidjian, S., Fingerman, K. L., Haas, M., Kaplan, D. M., Kim, Y. K., Knezevic, G., Lazarevic, L., Luo, M., Manson, J. H., Mascaro, J., Metcalf, C., Minor, K. S., Moseley, S., Polsinelli, A. J., Raison, C. L., Rilling, J., Robbins, M. L., Sbarra, D., Slatcher, R., Sun, J., Vasileva, M., Vazire, S., & Mehl, M. R. (2025). Are women really (not) more talkative than men? A registered replication of binary gender similarities/differences in daily word use. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. *indicates co-first authorship https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/pspp0000534
Baiocco, L., Pfeifer, V. A., & Lai, V. T. (2025). Metaphor processing is influenced by stimulus emotionality and task demands: Evidence from ERPs. Brain & Language, 261, Article 105530. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2024.105530
Pfeifer, V. A., Mehl, M., & Lai, V. T. (2024). That was clever of you! Perspective and verbal irony. Psychology of Language and Communication, 28(1), 390-414. https://doi.org/10.58734/plc-2024-0014
Pfeifer, V. A., Chilton, P., Grilli, M., & Mehl, M. R. (2024). How Ready Is Speech-to-Text for Psychological Language Research? Evaluating the Validity of AI-generated English Transcripts for Analyzing Free Spoken Responses in Younger and Older Adults. Behavior Research Methods, 56, 7621–7631. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02440-1
Pfeifer, V. A., Andrews-Hanna, J., & Lai, V. T. (2024). Can irony regulate negative emotion? Evidence from behavior and ERPs. Cognition and Emotion, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2024.2340118
Cay, G., Pfeifer, V., Lee, M., Dehghan Rouzi, M., Nunes A. S., El-Refaei, N., Momin, A. S., Atique, M., Mehl, M., Vaziri, A. & Najafi, B. (2024). Harnessing speech-derived digital biomarkers to detect and quantify cognitive decline severity in older adults. Gerontology, 70(4), 429–438. https://doi.org/10.1159/000536250
Pfeifer, V. A. & Pexman, P. M. (2024). When it pays to be insincere: On the benefits of verbal irony. Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 33 (1), 43-50. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214231205312
Pfeifer, V. A., Weihs, K. L, and Lai, V. T. (2023). Narratives about cancer: What metaphors can tell us about depressive symptoms in breast cancer patients. Health Communication, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2245989
Pfeifer, V. A. & Pexman, P. M. (2023). Mixed and ambiguous emotions can be studied with verbal irony. Cognitive Neuroscience, 14 (2), 65-67. 10.1080/17588928.2023.2181320
Donahoo, S. A., Pfeifer, V. A., & Lai, V. T. (2022). Cursed Concepts: New insights on combinatorial processing from ERP correlates of swearing in context. Brain & Language. 226. Article 105079. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2022.105079
Pfeifer, V. A., Armstrong, E. L., & Lai, V. T. (2022). Do all facial emojis communicate emotion? The impact of facial emojis on perceived sender emotion and text processing. Computers in Human Behavior. 126. Article 107016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.107016
Sendek, K., Herzmann, G., Pfeifer, V. A., & Lai, V. T. (2022). Social acquisition context matters: Increased neural responses for native but not non-native taboo words. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 22(2), 362-382. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-021-00951-4
Pfeifer, V. A. & Lai, V. T. (2021). The comprehension of irony in high and low emotional contexts. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 75(2), 120–125. https://doi.org/10.1037/cep0000250
Book Chapters
Lai, V. T., Hubbard, R., Ku, L.-Ch., & Pfeifer, V. (2023). Electrophysiology of non-literal language (pp. 613-646). In M. Grimaldi, E. Brattico, & Y. Shtyrov (Eds.), Language electrified: Principles, methods, and future perspectives of investigation. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3263-5_19
Lai, V.T., Pfeifer, V., & Ku, L.-Ch. (2024). Emotional language processing: An Individual differences approach. In K. Federmeier & C. Fairbairn (Eds.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 80. AP Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.plm.2024.03.006
Datasets
Pyarelal, A., Duong, E., Jones-Shibu, C., Soares, P., Boyd, S., Khosla, P., Pfeifer, V., Zhang, D., Andrews, E., Champlin, R., Raymond, V., Krishnaswamy, M., Morrison, C., Butler, E., Barnard, K. (2024). The Theory of Mind-based cognitive architecture for teams (ToMCAT) dataset. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36.