Many real life decisions don’t have right or wrong answers but often depend on personal values (e.g. health, education, family, environment) and preferences (e.g. food tastes, music tastes). Using a group decision making paradigm with real outcomes, I investigate how these values and preferences are revealed, modified, and integrated in group discussions and also leverage facial expressions and body pose data to evaluate how non-verbal signals can be indicative of people’s roles, influence, and satisfaction with decision outcomes.

Complex emotions such as regret, guilt, pain, and empathy are difficult to elicit and under investigated. Using decision-making paradigms with real interpersonal outcomes such as painful thermal stimulations applied to oneself or to others, we elicited these emotions and built facial expression models to pioneer new ways to study how experiencing these emotions impact social interactions and judgments of others.