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Showing XX publications and pre-prints

Preprints

Ong, D. C., Goldenberg, A., Inzlicht, M., & Perry, A. (under review). AI-Generated Empathy: Opportunities, limits, and future directions [ preprint ]

Hadjiandreou, E., Lau, T., & Ong, D. C. (2025 preprint). What LLMpathy can tell us about received empathy. [ preprint ]

Iyer, L., Aggarwal, K., Koyejo, S., Heyman, G., Ong, D. C., & Mukherjee, S. (2026 preprint). HEART: A Unified Benchmark for Assessing Humans and LLMs in Emotional Support Dialogue. [ preprint ] [ Forbes press ] [ TechXplore press ]

Gandhi, K., Lynch, Z., Fränken, J.-P., Patterson, K., Wambu, S., Gerstenberg, T., Ong, D. C., & Goodman, N. D. (2024 preprint). Human-like Affective Cognition in Foundation Models [ arXiv ]

Knox, W. B., Bradford, K., Castro, S. V., Ong, D. C., Williams, S., Romanow, J., Nations, C., Stone, P., & Baker, S. (2025 preprint). Harmful Traits of AI Companions. [ preprint ] [ press ]

Ong, D. C., Jospe, K., Reddan, M., Wu, Z., Kahhale, I., Chen, P., Perry, A., & Zaki, J. (2023 preprint). People optimally and flexibly process emotional information across multiple modalities [ preprint ] [ data ]

Suresh, V., Yeo, G., & Ong, D. C. (2023 preprint). Critically examining the Domain Generalizability of Facial Expression Recognition models [ preprint ]

Teo, D., & Ong, D. C. (2023 preprint). Instrumental Causal Learning [ preprint ] [ data ]

White papers and policy documents

Ong, D. C., Moore, J., Martinez-Martin, N., Meinhardt, C., Lin, E., & Agnew, W. (2025). Response to FDA's Request for Public Comment on Measuring and Evaluating AI-enabled Medical Device Performance in the Real World.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

in press

Yang, Y., Schoenwald, S. K., Moore, J., Ong, D. C., Liu, X., & Hancock, J. T. (2026). AI-Induced Delusional Spirals: Understanding Lived Experiences During Maladaptive Human-Chatbot Interactions. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Suh, J., Le, L., Shavegani, E., Ramos, G., Amores, J., Ong, D. C., Czerwinski, M. & Hernandez, J. (accepted). SENSE-7: Taxonomy and Dataset for Measuring User Perceptions of Empathy in Sustained Human-AI Conversations. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

Girard, J. M., Jun, D., Ong, D. C., Liebenthal, E., & Baker, J. T. (accepted). Sentiment Analysis of Naturalistic Speech using Open-Weight Large Language Models. Affective Science.

2025

Doan, T. H., Ong, D. C., & Wu, Y. (2025). Emotion understanding as third-person appraisals. Psychological Review, 132(1), 130–153.
[Editor's Choice Award 🏆 ]
* This was an equally-co-conceptualized idea reflected in the theoretical content (and the CRediT statement), even if not with official equal contribution notes.

Moore, J., Grabb, D., Agnew, W., Klyman, K., Chancellor, S., Ong, D. C.*, & Haber, N.* (2025). Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevent LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers. In 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT).
* Equal Contribution

Hecht, C. A.*, Ong, D. C.*, Clapper, M., Jones, M., Demszky, D., Yang, D., Eichstaedt, J., Bryan, C. J., & Yeager, D. S. (2025). Using Large Language Models in Behavioral Science Interventions: Promise and Risk. Behavioral Science & Policy, 11(1), 1-9
* Equal Contribution

Chen, P., Teo, Q. K., Foo, D. X. Y., Jiang, Y., Sun, L., Ong, X. L., Neo, D., Pereira, D. J. H., Tan, B., Chua, K. Q., Gan, J. X. F., & Ong, D. C. (2025). A Strategic Mindset Predicts and Promotes Effective Learning and Academic Performance. npj Science of Learning, 10 (74).

Munin, S., Jurkiewicz, O., Gueorguieva, E., Oveis, C., & Ong, D. C. (2025). What Can I say to Help You? Language Associated with Successful Extrinsic Emotion Regulation. Emotion.

Choudhury, M.*, Elyoseph, Z.*, Fast, N. J.*, Ong, D. C.*, Nsoesie, E. O.* & Pavlick, E.* (2025). The Promise and Pitfalls of Generative AI for Psychology and Society. Nature Reviews Psychology. 4, 75-80.
*All authors contributed equally and listed in alphabetical order
**Invited Submission, Viewpoint article

Munin, S., Ong, D. C., Okland, S., Freedman, G., & Beer, J. S. (2025). Language Measures Correlate With Other Measures Used to Study Emotion. Communications Psychology, 3, 29.

Reddan, M., Ong, D. C. , Wager, T. D., Mattek, S., Kahhale, I., & Zaki, J. (2025). Neural signatures of emotional intent and inference align during social consensus. Nature Communications, 16, 6156.

Rubin, M., Li, J., Zimmerman, F., Ong, D. C., Goldenberg, A., & Perry, A. (2025). Comparing the Value of Perceived Human versus AI-Generated Empathy. Nature Human Behaviour, 9, 2345–2359.

Jiang, K., Smith-Flores, A., Liang, K., Ong, D. C., & Powell, L. J. (2025). Vicarious emotion predictions integrate information about relationship strength. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 372-378.

Zhou, Y., Xu, H., Ong, D. C., Slovak, P., & He, Y. (2025). Modeling Subjectivity in Cognitive Appraisal with Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, 13811–13833.

2024

Yeo, G. C., & Ong, D. C. (2024). Associations between cognitive appraisals and emotions: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 150(12), 1440–1471.

Zhan, H., Zheng, A., Lee, Y. K., Suh, J., Li, J. J., & Ong, D. C. (2024). Large Language Models are Capable of Offering Cognitive Reappraisal, if Guided. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Language Modeling (COLM).

Lee, Y. K., Suh, J., Zhan, H., Li, J. J., & Ong, D. C. (2024). Large Language Models produce responses perceived to be empathic. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII).

Ong, D. C. (2024). GPT-ology, Computational Models, Silicon Sampling: How should we think about LLMs in Cognitive Science? In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 3968-3975.

Ong, D. C., Zhi-Xuan, T., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Goodman, N. D. (2024). Probabilistic Programming versus Meta-Learning as Models of Cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 47, e158. (Commentary)

Goel, S., Jara-Ettinger, J., Ong, D. C., & Gendron, M. (2024). Face and context integration in emotion inferences is limited and variable across categories and individuals. Nature Communications, 15, 2443.

Gueorguieva, E. S., Lau, T., Hadjiandreou, E., & Ong, D. C. (2024). The Language of an Empathy-Inducing Narrative. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2132-2139.

Kade, S. A., du Toit, S. A., Danielson, C. T., Schweizer, S., Morrison, A. S., Ong, D. C., Prasad, A., Holder, L. J., Han, J., Torok, M., & Wong, Q. J. J. (2024). Aberrant cognitive empathy in individuals with elevated social anxiety and regulation with emotional working memory training. Cognition and Emotion, 38, 4, 605--623.

Kahhale, I., Barry, R. K., Ong, D. C., Zaki, J., & Hanson, J. L., (2024). Exploring the Role of Empathy in the Association Between Early Life Adversity and Antisocial Behavior. Affective Science, 6, 128--144

Suh, J., Pendse, S. R., Lewis, R., Howe, E., Saha, K., Okoli, E., Amores, J., Ramos, G., Shen, J., Borghouts, J., Sharma, A., Pedrelli, P., Friedman, L., Jackman, C., Benhalim, Y., Ong, D. C., Segal, S., Althoff, T., & Czerwinski, M. (2024). Rethinking Technology Innovation for Mental Health: Framework for Multi-Sectoral Collaboration. Nature Mental Health, 2, 478--488.

2023

Demszky*, D., Yang*, D., Yeager*, D. S., Bryan, C. J., Clapper, M., Chandhok, S., Eichstaedt, J. C., Hecht, C., Jamieson, J., Johnson, M., Jones, M., Krettek-Cobb, D., Lai, L., JonesMitchell, N., Ong, D. C., Dweck^, C. S., Gross^, J. J., & Pennebaker^, J. W. (2023). Using Large Language Models in Psychology. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2, 688–701. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00241-5
* equal contribution, ^ equal contribution

Zhan, H., Ong, D. C., & Li, J.J. (2023). Evaluating Subjective Cognitive Appraisals of Emotions from Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023.

2022

Genzer, S.*, Ong, D. C.*, Zaki, J., & Perry, A. (2022). Mu rhythm suppression over sensorimotor regions is associated with greater empathic accuracy. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 17(9), 788–801.
* equal contribution

Chen, P., Teo, D. W. H., Foo, D. X. Y., Derry, H. A., Hayward, B. T., Schulz, K. W., Hayward, C., McKay, T. A., & Ong, D. C. (2022). Real-World Effectiveness of a Social-Psychological Intervention Translated from Controlled Trials to Classrooms. npj Science of Learning, 7 (20).

Suresh, V., & Ong, D. C. (2022). Using Positive Matching Contrastive Loss with Facial Action Units to mitigate bias in Facial Expression Recognition. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2022).

Teo, D. W. H., Ang, Z. Y., & Ong, D. C. (2022). Modeling Causal Inference from Emotional Displays. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2200-2206.

Goldenberg, A., Schöne, J., Huang, Z., Sweeny, T. D., Ong, D. C., Brady, T. F., Robinson, M. M., Levari, D., Zaki, J., & Gross, J. J. (2022). Amplification in the Evaluation of Multiple Emotional Expressions Over Time. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(10), 1408-1416.

Houlihan, S. D., Ong, D. C., Cusimano, M., & Saxe, R. (2022). Reasoning about the antecedents of emotions: Bayesian causal inference over an intuitive theory of mind. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 854-861.

Jospe, K., Genzer, S., Mansano, L., Ong, D. C., Zaki, J., Soroker, N., & Perry, A. (2022). Impaired empathic accuracy following damage to the left hemisphere. Biological Psychology, 172, 108380.

Weisz, E., Chen, P., Ong, D. C., Carlson, R. W., Clark, M. D., & Zaki, J. (2022). A Brief Intervention to Motivate Empathy among Middle School Students. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(12), 3144–3153.

2021

Ong, D. C. (2021). An Ethical Framework for Guiding the Development of Affectively-Aware Artificial Intelligence. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2021).
[Oral Presentation and Best Paper Award 🏆 ]

Ong, D. C., Soh, H., Zaki, J., & Goodman, N. D. (2021). Applying Probabilistic Programming to Affective Computing. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 12(2), 306-317.
[Best of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 2021 Paper Collection 🏆 ]

Ong, D. C., Wu, Z., Zhi-Xuan, T., Reddan, M., Kahhale, I., Mattek, A., & Zaki, J. (2021). Modeling emotion in complex stories: the Stanford Emotional Narratives Dataset. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 12(3), 579-594.

Chen, P.*, Ong, D. C.*, Ng, J., & Coppola, B. P. (2021). Explore, Exploit, and Prune in the Classroom: Strategic Resource Management Behaviors Predict Performance. AERA Open, 7(1), 1–14.
* equal contribution

Ong, D. C., Asaba, M., Lim, H. Y., Chen, P., & Gweon, H. (2021). "If only Santa had one more present": Exploring the development of near-miss counterfactual reasoning. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2363-2369.

Lai, Y., Kankanhalli, A., & Ong, D. C. (2021). Human-AI Collaboration in Healthcare: A Review and Research Agenda. In Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2021.

Nguyen, T.-S., Wu, Z., & Ong, D. C. (2021). Attention Uncovers Task-Relevant Semantics in Emotional Narrative Understanding. Knowledge-Based Systems, 226, 107162.

Suresh, V., & Ong, D. C. (2021). Not all negatives are equal: Label-Aware Constrastive Loss for fine-grained text classification. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021). [Oral Presentation]

Suresh, V., & Ong, D. C. (2021). Using Knowledge-Embedded Attention to Augment Pre-trained Language Models for Fine-Grained Emotion Recognition. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2021).

Teo, D. W. H. & Ong, D. C. (2021). Learning from Agentic Actions: Modelling Causal Inference from Intention. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2478-2484.

Wu, Z., & Ong, D. C. (2021). Context-Guided BERT for Targeted Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 35(16), 14094-14102.

Wu, Z., & Ong, D. C. (2021). Pragmatically Informative Color Generation by Grounding Contextual Modifiers. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics: 4(54), 438-445.

Weisz, E., Ong, D. C., Carlson, R. W., & Zaki, J. (2021). Building Empathy through Motivation-Based Intervention. Emotion, 21(5), 990–999

Wu, Z., Kreiss, E., Ong, D. C., & Potts, C. G. (2021). ReaSCAN: Compositional Reasoning in Language Grounding. In Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks (NeurIPS 2021)

2020

Jospe, K., Genzer, S., Klein-Selle, N., Ong, D. C., Zaki, J. & Perry, A. (2020). The contribution of linguistic and visual cues to physiological synchrony and empathic accuracy. Cortex, 132, 296-308.

Wu, Z., Nguyen, T.-S., & Ong, D. C. (2020). Structured Self-Attention Weights Encodes Semantics in Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the Third BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, 255-264.

Zhi-Xuan, T., Soh, H., & Ong, D. C. (2020). Factorized Inference in Deep Markov Models for Incomplete Multimodal Time Series. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34(06), 10334-10341.

2019

Ong, D. C., Zaki, J., & Goodman, N. D. (2019). Computational models of emotion inference in Theory of Mind: A review and roadmap. Topics in Cognitive Science. 11(2), 338-357.

Asaba, M.*, Ong, D. C.*, & Gweon, H. (2019). Integrating expectations and outcomes: Preschoolers' developing ability to reason about others' emotions. Developmental Psychology, 55(8), 1680-1693.
* equal contribution

Tan, Z.-X. & Ong, D. C. (2019). Bayesian Inference of Social Norms as Shared Constraints on Behavior. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2919-2925.

Tan, Z. X.*, Goel, A.*, Nguyen, T.-S.*, & Ong, D. C. (2019). A Multimodal LSTM for Predicting Listener Empathic Responses over time. Presented at the OMG-Empathy Challenge workshop at the 14th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) 2019.
* equal contribution

Wu, Z., Zhang, X., Zhi-Xuan, T., Zaki, J. & Ong, D. C. (2019). Attending to Emotional Narratives. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2019).

Xie, Y., Bodala, I. P., Ong, D. C., Hsu, D., & Soh, H. (2019). Robot Capability and Intention in Trust-based Decisions across Tasks. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2019, 39-47.

2018

Ong, D. C., Goodman, N. D., & Zaki, J. (2018). Happier than thou? A self-enhancement bias in emotion attribution. Emotion, 18(1), 116-126.

Williams, W. C., Morelli, S. A., Ong, D. C., & Zaki, J. (2018). Interpersonal emotion regulation: Implications for affiliation, perceived support, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(2), 224-254.

2014–2017

Ong, D. C., Zaki., J., & Gruber, J. (2017). Increased cooperative behavior across remitted bipolar I disorder and major depression: Insights utilizing a behavioral economic trust game. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126(1), 1-7.

Chen, P., Chavez, O., Ong, D. C., & Gunderson, B. (2017). Strategic Resource Use for Learning: A Self-administered Intervention that Guides Effective Resource Use Enhances Academic Performance. Psychological Science, 28(6), 774-785.

Morelli, S. A., Ong, D. C., Makati, R., Jackson, M. O., & Zaki, J. (2017). Empathy and well-being correlate with centrality in different social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(37), 9843-9847.X

Ong, D. C.*, Asaba, M.*, & Gweon, H. (2016). Young children and adults integrate past expectations and current outcomes to reason about others' emotions. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 135-140.
* equal contribution

Ong, D. C., Zaki, J. & Goodman, N. D. (2016). Emotions in lay explanations of behavior. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 360-365.

Devlin, H. C., Zaki., J., Ong, D. C., & Gruber, J. (2016). Tracking the emotional highs, but missing the lows: Hypomania Risk is associated with positively biased empathic inference. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 40(1), 72-79.

Nook, E., Ong, D. C., Morelli, S. A., Mitchell, J. P., & Zaki, J. (2016). Prosocial Conformity: Prosocial norms generalize across behavior and empathy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(8), 1045-1062. doi: 10.1177/0146167298248001

Ong, D. C., Zaki, J., & Goodman, N. D. (2015). Affective Cognition: Exploring lay theories of emotion. Cognition, 143, 141-162.

Ong, D. C., Goodman, N. D., & Zaki, J. (2015). Near-misses sting even when they are uncontrollable. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1775-1780.

Phillips, J.*, Ong, D. C.*, Surtees, A. D. R., Xin, Y., Williams, S., Saxe, R., & Frank, M. C. (2015). A second look at automatic Theory of Mind: reconsidering Kovács, Téglás, and Endress (2010). Psychological Science, 26 (9), 1353-1367.
* equal contribution

Devlin, H. C., Zaki., J., Ong, D. C., & Gruber, J. (2014). Not as Good as You Think? Trait Positive Emotion is Associated with Increased Self-Reported Empathy but Decreased Empathic Performance. PLOS ONE, 9(10), e110470.

Pre-2014; Previous work in physics and optics

Leahy, B. D., Cheng, X., Ong, D. C., Liddell-Watson, C., & Cohen, I. (2013) Enhancing rotational diffusion using oscillatory shear. Physical Review Letters, 110, 228301

Ong, D. C., Solanki, S., Liang, X., & Xu, X. (2012). Analysis of laser speckle severity, granularity, and anisotropy using the power spectral density in polar-coordinate representation. Optical Engineering, 51, 054301

Gerbode, S. J., Ong, D. C., Liddell, C. M., & Cohen, I. (2010). Dislocations and vacancies in two-dimensional mixed crystals of spheres and dimers. Physical Review E, 82, 041404

Gerbode, S. J., Agarwal, U., Ong, D. C., Liddell, C. M., Escobedo, F., & Cohen, I. (2010). Glassy Dislocation Dynamics in 2-D Colloidal Dimer Crystals. Physical Review Letters, 105, 078301