Professional Background

    I was educated in Britain, gaining my Bachelor's degree from the University of Edinburgh, where I majored in philosophy, and then doing my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of London's Imperial College of Science and Technology. My Ph.D. dissertation was concerned with graphical interface design. In 1973, I joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, with appointments in Education and in Psychology, I started to investigate questions having to do with knowledge representation and language understanding, concentrating in particular on the communicative functions of, and the processes involved in the production and comprehension of nonliteral (especially metaphorical) uses of language. My approach to research problems is strongly interdisciplinary, as is evident from the diverse perspectives on metaphor represented in (the second edition, 1993) of my edited book, Metaphor and Thought.

    In 1981 I started a long collaboration with Gerald Clore (now at the University of Virginia) working on the relationship between emotion and cognition. This culminated in the publication of our 1988 book (with Allan Collins), The Cognitive Structure of Emotions which proposes a computationally tractable model of the cognitive basis of emotion elicitation. This model, which in the affective computing community has come to be known as the OCC model, is now one of the standard models for emotion synthesis used in that community. Since moving to Northwestern University in 1989, I have maintained my interest in research on metaphor. At the same time, I have become increasingly interested in emotion research as it relates to various aspects of Artificial Intelligence, including the design of intelligent agents, as well as in exploring the relationship between affect, cognition, motivation, behavior and personality--explorations that I undertake primarily in collaboration with my colleague Bill Revelle.

Singapore Project

    Two years ago, I embarked on a major new research initiative in Singapore under the auspices of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore’s national agency for promoting research in science and technology. Located in the Advanced Computing research cluster of the Institute for High Performance Computing (IHPC), the initiative goes by the name of Computational Social Cognition (CSC) - everything in Singapore is identified by an acronym! In broad outline, CSC can be thought of as an attempt to develop what might be called Social Cognitive Science. We are interested in developing agent-based models of plausible, contextually appropriate, social interaction. To this end, we are assembling an interdisciplinary team of researchers with backgrounds in areas such as social and cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, decision theory, cognitive architectures and multi-agent systems, and social robotics. Our research group is not only highly interdisciplinary, it is also highly international, with the twelve research staff currently in place comprising people of six different nationalities.

    More information on the scientific and physical context in which this project is situated can be found in the October 23, 2008 issue of Nature.

Downloadable Publications

    Ortony, A. (1971). A system for stereo viewing. Computer Journal, 14, 140-144.

    Ortony, A. (1975). Why metaphors necessary and not just nice. Educational Theory, 25, 45-53.

    Anderson, R. C., & Ortony, A. (1975). On putting apples into bottles: A problem of

polysemy. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 167-180.

    Halff, H. M., Ortony, A., & Anderson, R. C. (1976). A context-sensitive representation of

word meanings. Memory & Cognition, 4, 378-383.

    Rumelhart, D. E., & Ortony, A. (1977). The representation of knowledge in memory. In R. C. Anderson, R. J. Spiro & W. E. Montague (Eds.), Schooling and the acquisition of knowledge. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum

    Ortony, A., Schallert, D. L., Reynolds, R. E. & Antos, S. J. (1978). Interpreting metaphors and idioms: Some effects of context on comprehension. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 17, 465-477.

    Ortony, A. (1979). Beyond Literal Similarity. Psychological Review, 86, 161-180.

    Reynolds, R. E. & Ortony, A. (1980). Some issues in the measurement of children's comprehension of metaphorical language. Child Development, 51, 1110-1119

    Ortony, A., Vondruska, R. J., Foss, M. A. & Jones, L. E. (1985). Salience, similes, and

the asymmetry of similarity. Journal of Memory and Language, 24, 569-594.

    Fainsilber, L., & Ortony, A. (1987). Metaphor production in the description of emotional states. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 2, 239-250.

    Ortony, A., & Partridge, D. (1987). Surprisingness and expectation failure: What's the difference? In Proceedings of the tenth international joint conference on artificial intelligence. Milan, Italy.

    Ortony, A., Clore, G. L. & Foss, M. A. (1987). The referential structure of the affective lexicon. Cognitive Science, 11, 341-364.

    Ortony, A. (1988). Are emotion metaphors conceptual or lexical? Cognition & Emotion, 2, 95-103.

    Medin, D. L. & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Ortony, A. & Turner, T. J. (1990). What's basic about basic emotions? Psychological Review, 97, 315-331

    Ortony, A. (1991). Value and emotion. In W. Kessen, A. Ortony, & F. Craik (Eds.) Memories, thoughts, and emotions: Essays in honor of George Mandler. Hillsdale, NJ : Erlbaum.

    O'Rorke, P. & Ortony, A. (1994). Explaining emotions. Cognitive Science, 18, 283-323.

    Clore, G. L. & Ortony, A. (2000). Cognition in emotion: Always, sometimes, or never? In L. Nadel, R. Lane & G. L. Ahern (Eds). The Cognitive neuroscience of emotion. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Norman, D.A., Ortony, A., & Russell, D.M. (2003). Affect and machine design: Lessons for the development of autonomous machines. IBM Systems Journal, 42, 38-44.

    Ortony, A. (2003). On making believable emotional agents believable. In R. Trappl, P. Petta & S. Payr (Eds.), Emotions in humans and artifacts. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

    Ortony, A., Norman, D. A., & Revelle, W. (2005). Affect and proto-affect in effective functioning. In J.M. Fellous & M.A. Arbib, Who needs emotions: The brain meets the machine. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Ortony, A., Revelle, W. & Zinbarg, R. (2007). Why Emotional Intelligence needs a fluid component. In G. Matthews, M. Zeidner & R. D. Roberts (Eds.). The science of Emotional Intelligence. Oxford University Press.

    Fua, K., Horswill, I., Ortony, A. & Revelle, W. (2009). Reinforcement sensitivity theory and cognitive architectures. In Technical Report of the Symposium on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, AAAI Fall Symposium Series, Arlington, VA, November 5-7.

    Pautler, D., Koenig, B., Quek, B-K & Ortony, A. (2011). Using modified incremental chart parsing to ascribe intentions to animated geometric figures. Behavior Research Methods, 43(3), 643-665.

    Quek, B-K & Ortony, A. (2012). Assessing implicit attitudes: What can be learned from simulations? Social Cognition, 30(5), 610-630.

    Gupta, S., Sakamoto, K., & Ortony, A. (2013). Telling it like it isn’t: A comprehensive approach to analyzing verbal deception. In F. Paglieri, L. Tummolini, R. Falcone & M. Miceli (Eds.), The goals of cognition: Festschfit for Cristiano Castelfranchi. London, College Publications.

Full Curriculum Vitae

Personal

    My mother, from Prague, and my father, from a small town in western Slovakia (center of map), met, married, and produced me, in England during WWII. After the war we all moved to Slovakia, but the political climate there caused my parents to send me back to England after a little over a year, and a few months later they joined me, and took up permanent residence in England. Thus, I grew up in England, in a dull provincial city, Peterborough, 75 miles north of London (it's amazing that the place has a web site - less amazing that it’s dull!).

    I moved to the United States in 1973, taking a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I stayed for 17 years, and where I raised my wonderful children. Alison, my oldest daughter, graduated from UIUC with a major in Mathematics and now teaches mathematics at a middle school in a Chicago suburb. Her brother, Jacob, a serious bicyclist, has aspirations information technology, but is still finding himself, and Julia, the youngest, after gaining her PhD in Chemistry and Materials Science at UC Santa Barbara, is now a postdoc in the Institute for Bionotechnology in Medicine (IBNAM) ate Northwestern University. Meanwhile, I live in a penthouse apartment (see red arrow tip) of a magnificent high-rise in downtown Chicago from which I can see three states and a spectacular view overlooking navy pier.

    Although not myself a musician, I'm a great lover of classical music, and especially of 19th century opera. I'm a regular subscriber to the Lyric Opera of Chicago. A many years ago I purchased a piano and started taking piano lessons. I figured that if nothing else, maybe I'd learn something about learning. What I learned is that learning can be hard, and alas, I made no progress with the piano! In spite of my lack of musical knowledge, I am working away writing the libretto for an opera with an Israeli composer friend of mine. My part is now pretty much finished, but a great deal of music remains to be written. Apart from my love of music, I'm mildly addicted to watching professional and college sports (usually football and basketball, and usually on TV). I also am a competent, though by no means good, squash player, and I enjoy cycling, although only in the warmer months. I like the sun and warmth - preferring a Caribbean beach to an Alpine ski slope.

    

 

        * Psychology Department, Northwestern University

        * International Society for Research on Emotions

Last updated: February, 2013.