Phone: Fax: Email: |
(847) 467-3813 (847) 491-8889 |
 |
Phone: Fax: Email: |
(847) 467-3813 (847) 491-8889 |
|
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 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. 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.
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.
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. & 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. (in press). Why Emotional Intelligence needs a fluid component. To appear in G. Matthews, M. Zeidner & R. D. Roberts (Eds.). The science of Emotional Intelligence. Oxford University Press.
My mother, from Prague, and my father, from a small provincial 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 town, Peterborough, 75 miles north of London (it's amazing that the town has a web site - less amazing that it hasn't been updated for years!).I moved to the United States in 1973, taking a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I lived 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, currently works for Whole Foods and is a serious bicyclist, and Julia, the youngest, is a PhD student in Chemistry at UC Santa Barbara. Meanwhile, I live in an apartment on a high floor of a magnificent high-rise (the Olympia Center) in downtown Chicago. I have spectacular views to the north, south, east, and west, as well as down to Chicago's famous Magnificent Mile.
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 few 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! 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.
- School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University
- Psychology Department, Northwestern University
- International Society for Research on Emotions
Last updated: January 11, 2006
