Jeffrey Girard

Jeff Girard
  • Pilot Project Leader
  • Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
  • Program Director, Brain, Behavior & Quantitative Science Program
  • M. Erik Wright Scholar
  • Co-Director of the Kansas Data Science Consortium

Contact Info

Fraser Hall, Room #454
Lawrence
1415 Jayhawk Boulevard
Lawrence, KS 66045

Personal Links

Biography —

Dr. Girard studies how emotions are expressed through verbal and nonverbal behavior, as well as how interpersonal communication is influenced by individual differences (e.g., personality and mental health) and social factors (e.g., culture and context). This work is deeply interdisciplinary and draws insights and tools from various areas of social science, computer science, statistics, and medicine.

Education —

Ph.D. in Psychology (Clincal), University of Pittsburgh
M.S. in Psychology (Clinical), University of Pittsburgh
B.A. in Psychology & Philosophy, University of Washington

Research —

Research interests:

  • Affective Communication
  • Affective Computing
  • Clinical Assessment
  • Interpersonal Functioning
  • Technology in Psychology
  • Statistics and Machine Learning

Teaching —

Statistical Methods in Psychology I (PSYC 790)

Statistical Methods in Psychology II (PSYC 791)

Data Science in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (PSYC 792)

Data 2: Foundations of Data Science (PSYC/ECON/POLS 399)

Selected Publications —

Girard, J. M., Yermol, D. A., Salah, A. A., & Cohn, J. F. (2025). Computational analysis of expressive behavior in clinical assessment. Annual Reviews in Clinical Psychology. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/uf4nq_v1

Girard, J. M., Yermol, D. A., Bylsma, L. M., Cohn, J. F., Fournier, J. C., Morency, L., & Swartz, H. A. (2025). Dynamic and dyadic relationships between facial behavior, working alliance, and treatment outcomes during depression therapy. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/b2a87_v1

Chung, Y., Girard, J. M., Ravichandran, C., Öngür, D., Cohen, B. M., & Baker, J. T. (2025). Transdiagnostic modeling of clinician-rated symptoms in affective and nonaffective psychotic disorders. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, 134(1), 81–96. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/uygte_v1

Agrawal, V., Akinyemi, A., Alvero, K., et al. (2025). Seamless interaction: dyadic audiovisual motion modeling and large-scale dataset. arXiv:2506.22554 [cs.CV] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22554

Kebe, G. Y., Girard, J. M., Liebenthal, E., Baker, J. T., De la Torre, F., & Morency, L. (2025). LlaMADRS: prompting large language models for interview-based depression assessment. arXiv:2501.03624 [cs.HC] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03624

Service —

  • President of the Society for Interpersonal Theory and Research (2024-2025)
  • Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
  • Associate Editor of Collabra Psychology
  • Director of the Brain, Behavior, and Quantitative Science PhD Program
  • Co-Director of the Kansas Data Science Consortium