All colloquia will be held in person. The fall colloquia location is White-Gravenor Hall, Room 208, unless otherwise listed. The spring colloquia location is also still to be announced. Please send an email to gupsychologydepartment@georgetown.edu for additional information.
October 2, 2026, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Desmond Ong, Associate Professor, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics Group, University of Texas at Austin
Title: The bright and dark sides of AI-generated empathy: LLMpathy and AI Sycophancy
Greater numbers of people are turning to Large Language Models (LLMs) for emotional support and mental health. Growing evidence suggests that LLMs produce language that people perceive as more empathic than human-written responses, what I call LLMpathy. But LLMpathic responses also tend to be templated, implying that these models may have difficulty with taking context into account. Such context insensitivity has implications for mental health, including AI providing overly positive affirmation in contexts that would be considered socially non-normative—so-called AI sycophancy and what I consider the dark side of LLMpathy. We have documented evidence of such harmful indicators both in “AI Audit” studies and in real users’ transcripts. As psychologists we should meet this moment head on; not just by empirically studying the effects of such behavior on well-being and mental health, but also to think about how society should use such technologies.
RSVP: https://forms.gle/yXKowX2cqrfVwxuY6
October 23, 2026, 4 pm
Location: Intercultural Center Auditorium
Speaker: Dr. Judy Kim, Assistant Professor, Psychology Department, American University
Title: To Be Announced
RSVP: https://forms.gle/R3rKtoGNnB6sVSEq5
November 6, 2026, 12 pm
Location: Reiss Science Building, Room 112 (Auditorium)
Speaker: Dr. Ariel Kalil, Daniel Levin Professor, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago
Title: To Be Announced
RSVP: https://forms.gle/NrLba7zRHjLcuevcA
December 4, 2026, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Julia Cassaniti, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
Title: To Be Announced
RSVP: https://forms.gle/JithjFsWtM88ereNA
January 22, 2027, 12 pm
Speaker: To Be Announced
Title: To Be Announced
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March 12, 2027, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Olga Kornienko, Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology, George Mason University
Title: To Be Announced
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April 23, 2027, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Roshni Raveendhran, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia
Title: To Be Announced
RSVP:
April 30, 2027, 12 pm
Speaker: To Be Announced
Title: To Be Announced
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