Ortony

Ortony is a surname of English origin. One notable bearer is Andrew Ortony, a psychologist and co-author of The Cognitive Structure of Emotions (1988) with Gerald L. Clore and Allan Collins. The trio is known for the OCC model of emotions, short for Ortony, Clore, and Collins, a cognitive framework for representing and evaluating emotions.

The OCC model posits that emotions arise from evaluative judgments about events, agents, and objects in relation to an individual's goals and standards. Events are appraised for desirability, agents for praiseworthiness or blame, and objects for appealingness or disliking. From these appraisals, a range of emotions can be inferred, including joy, distress, hope, fear, pride, and shame.

The OCC model has been influential in affective computing, artificial intelligence, and psychology, informing simulations of emotional responses in software agents and contributing to natural-language understanding of emotion in text. The name Ortony is mainly encountered as a surname in scholarly contexts, particularly in citations of the OCC framework.