Jonathan Gratch

About

Jonathan Gratch is a Research Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at USC. His work focuses on the intersection of computer science and psychology, contributing to understanding human-computer interaction, emotion modeling, and virtual agents. His research aims to develop intelligent systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions to improve communication and collaboration between humans and machines.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Communication
• Human–computer interaction
• Sociology
• Epistemology
• Economics

Selected publications

• The rise of affectivism

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2021 · 216 citations

  DOI

• The avatar will see you now: Support from a virtual human provides socio-emotional benefits

  Computers in Human Behavior · 2022 · 72 citations

  When people are in emotional distress, they often seek support. Virtual humans may provide unique and complementary benefits to human support provision, given that virtual humans are readily available and help sharers overcome socio-evaluative threats, thereby increasing willingness to disclose. Here, we examined whether talking to a virtual human elicits socio-emotional benefits, and whether this is moderated by the type of support provided. To examine the scope of the potential effect, we comp…

  DOI

• Synchrony facilitates altruistic decision making for non-human avatars

  Computers in Human Behavior · 2021 · 25 citations

  Synchrony is a natural part of human interaction and is often associated with a variety of prosocial outcomes including affinity and rapport. The purpose of this research was to examine whether human negotiators would synchronize their movements when working with non-human avatars and if so, whether that would affect their perceptions of their negotiations. Results suggest that participants synchronized their movements with the movements of non-human negotiation partners, that greater synchrony…

  PublisherDOI

• Improving social connection with weak ties and strangers: effects of a new micro-intervention on interaction quality and social behavior

  The Journal of Positive Psychology · 2024-08-29 · 18 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Modeling Culturally and Emotionally Affected Behavior

  Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment · 2008 · 15 citations

  Culture and emotions have a profound impact on human behavior. Consequently, high-fidelity simulated interactive environments (e.g., trainers and computer games) that involve virtual humans must model socio-cultural and emotional effects on agent behavior. In this paper we discuss two recently fielded systems that do so independently: Culturally Affected Behavior (CAB) and EMotion and Adaptation (EMA). We then propose a simple language that combines the two systems in a natural way thereby enabl…

  DOI

Recent grants

• HCC: Building Rapport with Virtual Humans

  NSF · $450k · 2007–2011

• Advancing the Use of Automated Dialogue Systems for Teaching Communication and Interpersonal Skills

  NSF · $745k · 2018–2022

• SoCS: Achieving the Interpersonal Function of Affect in Human-Machine Collaboration

  NSF · $700k · 2012–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Gale Lucas

  252 shared

• Stacy Marsella

  Universidad del Noreste

  162 shared

• David Traum

  92 shared

• Louis‐Philippe Morency

  92 shared

• Celso M. de Melo

  DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory

  89 shared

• Giota Stratou

  Keysight Technologies (United States)

  83 shared

• Stefan Scherer

  META Health

  63 shared

• Johnathan Mell

  University of Central Florida

  59 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of Southern California

  1992

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of Southern California

  1989

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of Southern California

  1986

Awards & honors

• 2008 International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents…
• 2008 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction Best…
• 2007 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education…
• 2005 Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems Be…
• 2003 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi…

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• Muhao Chenh-74
• Ewa Deelmanh-73