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Publications Currently showing all publications

Pre-prints and Manuscripts Under Review

  • 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 ]

  • 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 ]

  • Reddan, M., Ong, D. C. , Wager, T. D., Mattek, S., Kahhale, I., & Zaki, J. (2023 preprint). Neural signatures of emotional inference and experience align during social consensus. [ preprint ]

  • 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 ]

Accepted and published articles

  1. Pavlick, E., Ong, D. C., Elyoseph, Z., Choudhury, M., Fast, N. J., & Nsoesie, E. O. (to appear). The Promise and Pitfalls of Generative AI for Psychology and Society. Nature Reviews Psychology.
    (All authors contributed equally; invited submission)

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

  3. Doan, T., Ong, D. C., & Wu, Y. (2024). Emotion understanding as third-person appraisals: Integrating appraisal theories with developmental theories of emotion. Psychological Review.

    [ journal website ] [ preprint ]

  4. Yeo, G. & Ong, D. C. (2024). Associations Between Cognitive Appraisals and Emotions: A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin, 150(12), 1440–1471.

    [ journal website , supplemental material ] [ preprint with supplemental ] [ GitHub repository (data and code) , OSF mirror] [ R Shiny applet (note: on free tier, may be limited)]

  5. 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.

    [ journal website ]

  6. 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).

    [ arXiv ] [ OpenReview page ] [ repository ]

  7. 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).

    [ arXiv ] [ repository ]

  8. 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.

    [ arXiv ]

  9. 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.

    [ preprint ]

  10. 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)

    [ journal website , along with target article by Binz et al.] [ preprint ]

  11. Goel, S., Jara-Ettinger, J., Ong, D. C., & Gendron, M. (2024). Integration of facial and contextual cues in emotion inferences is limited and variable across categories and individuals. Nature Communications, 15, 2443.

    [ journal website (Open Access) ]

  12. Suh, J., Pendse, S. R., Lewis, R., Howe, E., Saha, K., Okoli, E., Amores, J., Ramos, G., Shen, J., Borghouts, J., Sharma, A., Paola, 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.

    [ journal website (Author Sharing Link) ]

  13. 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.

    [ journal website (Open Access) ]


    14. 2023

  14. 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

    [ journal website ] [ press release ]

  15. 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.

    [ arXiv ] [ repository ]


    16. 2022

  16. 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

    [ journal website (open access) ] [ pre-print ]

  17. 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).

    [ journal website [open access] ] [ OSF ] [ rendered analysis code ]

  18. 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 Emotional Expressions Over Time. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(10), 1408-1416.

    [ preprint ] [ journal website ] [ data and code ]

  19. 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.

    [ link to proceedings ]

  20. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ journal website ]

  21. 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).

    [ arXiv ] [ proceedings website ]

  22. Teo, D., 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.

    [ link to proceedings ]

  23. 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.

    [ preprint ] [ journal website ]


    24. 2021

  24. 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 🏆]

    [ pdf ] [ arXiv ] [ proceedings ] [ talk ]

  25. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ link to proceedings ] [ OSF: pre-registration, code, data ]

  26. 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 🏆]

    [ pre-print ] [ arXiv ] [ journal website ]
    Material from this paper was presented as a Tutorial at Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, in Cambridge, UK, September 2019:
    Ong, D. C., Tan, Z.-X., Soh, H., Zaki, J., & Goodman, N. D. (2019). "Integrating Theory-Driven and Data-Driven Approaches to Affective Computing via Deep Probabilistic Programming".
    and at a Tutorial at A*STAR, Singapore, June 2018.
    Ong, D. C., & Goodman, N. D. (2018). "Applying Probabilistic Programming to building Human-Centric AI Technologies".

  27. 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.

    [ pre-print ] [ arXiv ] [ journal website ] [ GitHub (code) ] [ dataset information ]

  28. 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

    [ pdf ] [ journal website ] [ code @ ICPSR ] [ GitHub (mirror of ICPSR) ] [ rendered analysis code ]

  29. 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.

    [ link to proceedings ]

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

    [ pdf ] [ journal website ]

  31. 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]

    [ arXiv ] [ GitHub ]

  32. 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). [Oral Presentation]

    [ pdf ] [ arXiv ] [ Github ]

  33. Teo, D. & 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.

    [ pdf ] [ link to proceedings ] [ GitHub ]

  34. Weisz, E., Ong, D. C., Carlson, R. W., & Zaki, J. (2021). Building Empathy: A Brief Intervention to Promote Social Connection. Emotion, 21(5), 990–999

    [ pdf ] [ journal website ] [ data ]

  35. 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).

    [ arXiv ] [ link to proceedings ] [ GitHub ]

  36. 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.

    [ arXiv ] [ link to proceedings ] [ GitHub ]

  37. 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)

    [ arXiv ] [ GitHub ]


    38. 2020

  38. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ journal website ]

  39. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ ACL Anthology website ] [ GitHub ]

  40. 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.

    [ arXiv ] [ link to proceedings ] [ GitHub ]
    [ Oral presentation by Zhi-Xuan, T.: talk slides ] [ poster pdf ] [ Oral acceptance rate: 5.9% (454/7737), overall acceptance rate: 20.56% ]


    41. 2019

  41. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ journal website ]

  42. 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

    [ pdf ] [ PsyArXiv ] [ repository ] [ journal website ]

  43. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ arXiv ] [ GitHub ]

  44. 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

    [ arXiv ]

  45. 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).

    [ arXiv ] [ GitHub ]
    [ Oral presentation by Ong, D. C.: talk slides ]

  46. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ link to proceedings ] [ Oral presentation by Xie, Y. ]


    47. 2018

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

    [ pdf ] [ supporting data and materials ] [ journal website ]

  48. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ supplemental materials ] [ supporting data and materials ] [ journal website ]


    49. 2017 and earlier

  49. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ supporting data and materials ] [ journal website ]

  50. 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.

    [ pre-journal-formatted version ] [ supporting data and materials (link on OSF, the Open Science Framework; access available upon request) ] [ journal website ]
    [ Quartz article ] [ Stanford News Release ] [ Psychological Science News Release ] [ U.S. News & World Report ] [ Business Insider (German) ]
    [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ]

  51. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ supplemental materials ] [ supporting data and materials ] [ journal website ]
    [ Washington Post ] [ Quartz ] [ Stanford News Release ] [ press ]

  52. 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

    [ pdf ] [ supporting data and materials ]

  53. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ supporting data and materials ]

  54. 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 accuracy inference. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 40(1), 72-79.

    [ summary ]
    [ pdf ] [ journal website ]

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

    [ pdf ] [ supplemental materials ] [ supporting data and materials ] [ journal website ]
    [ Scientific American article ] [ press (aps link) ]

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

    [ summary ]
    [ pdf ] [ supporting data and materials ] [ journal website ]

  57. 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.

    [ pdf ] [ supporting data and materials ]

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

    [ pdf ] [ supporting data and materials ] [ journal website ]
    [ Blogpost by senior author Mike Frank , followup blogpost ]

  59. 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.

    [ summary ]
    [ pdf ] [ supporting data and materials ] [ journal website ]
    [ Forbes ] [ HuffPost ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ] [ press ]
    [ Nov 2014, Made it to #13 on the front page of Reddit, and #1 on r/Science, with over 6,600 upvotes and 800 comments ]
    [ Mar 2017, Made it to #1 on the front page of Reddit, with over 26,600 upvotes and 1.3k comments ]


    60. Pre-2014; Previous work in physics and optics

  60. 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

    [ summary ]
    [ pdf ] [ journal website ] [ press ]

  61. 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

    [ summary ]
    [ pdf ] [ journal website ]

  62. 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

    [ summary ]
    [ pdf ] [ journal website ]

  63. 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

    [ summary ]
    [ pdf ] [ journal website ]



Theses & Dissertations

  • Ong, D. C. (2017). Computational Affective Cognition: Modeling Reasoning about Emotions. Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University.

  • Ong, D. C. (2011). Serial Reciprocity: What makes us want to 'pass it on'?. Honors Thesis, Cornell University.
    * awarded summa cum laude for best thesis.

(Unpublished) Class Projects

  • Ong, D. C. (2015). Continuous emotion inference from speech signals. CS 221: Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University, Autumn 2015.

  • Ong, D. C., Soh, S., & Long, M. (2015). Extracting Aspect-level Sentiment from Product Reviews. CS 224D: Deep Learning for NLP, Stanford University, Spring 2015.

  • Ong, D. C., Chio, C., & Kek, J. (2014). Predicting mood transitions from text interactions on the Experience Project. CS 224U: Natural Language Understanding, Stanford University, Spring 2014.

  • Ong, D. C. & Shen, M. (2013). Analyzing Social Support on the Experience Project. CS 224W: Social and Information Networks, Stanford University, Fall 2013.

  • Ong, D. C. & Lui., W. H. (2013). Building an Emotional Relation Extraction Tool. CS 224N: Natural Language Processing, Stanford University, Fall 2013.
    Lui., W. H., & Ong, D. C. (2013). Sentiment Causation Extraction. (Lui's) CS 229: Machine Learning, Stanford University, Fall 2013.

  • Wu., J. Y., & Ong, D. C. (2012). Predicting Sentiment from Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews. CS 229: Machine Learning, Stanford University, Fall 2012.