Governing Global Emotions

Technology and The New Science of Feeling

What goes wrong when emotions get turned into digital data to be measured, monitored and managed

Data from facial emotion recognition, brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality, global emotion surveys and sentiment analysis offer an extraordinary new terrain for scientific exploration. Emotion sensing promises to decode and even to augment and control the very essence of human experience. But what if the science and technology of emotion measurement get emotions wrong? In Governing Global Emotions, Jessica Pykett argues that we must shift our thinking on digital emotional governance and calls for a radical reassessment of the fundamental claims of emotion science.

Pykett offers a groundbreaking account of how emotions are defined, used and governed through emerging digital technologies, arguing that emotions, senses and feelings have become a crucial new arena for