Jolie B. Wormwood

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About

Jolie B. Wormwood is a leading researcher in affective science and social perception, with a focus on how emotions and nonverbal behavior shape interpersonal trust and decision-making. Her most influential work, "Computationally modeling interpersonal trust" (2013, 95 citations), introduced a groundbreaking computational model that predicts an individual’s level of trust toward a novel partner with greater accuracy than human observers—by analyzing subtle nonverbal cues expressed during social interaction. This work bridges psychology and artificial intelligence, demonstrating that machine learning can decode trust-related signals that humans often miss. Wormwood’s broader research explores how emotional states, such as fear or anxiety, color our perceptions of others and influence real-world judgments, from credibility assessments to threat detection. Her contributions have been recognized with early career awards and funding from the National Science Foundation. By combining rigorous behavioral experiments with computational modeling, Wormwood offers powerful tools for understanding the hidden dynamics of human social interaction, with implications for fields ranging from human-computer interaction to forensic psychology.