Governing Global Emotions

Technology and The New Science of Feeling

Jessica Pykett

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9780691284514
  9780691284460
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691286662
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 political, economic and cultural struggles. She describes how technologies create emotional data, how smart cities use sensors to monitor residents’ feelings and how global economies measure happiness. Drawing on twenty years of interdisciplinary social science, Pykett documents how emotion science continues to delve deeper, as researchers look for evolutionary continuity, biological certainty and neuroscientific consensus. What she finds instead is a divided field vulnerable to significant criticism. Pykett concludes that standardised, universal and instrumentalised scientific accounts of emotions are machinic, and when divorced from context, they can never be global.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Feelism in Government, Technology, and Culture
• 2 Situating Global Emotions
• 3 Emotion Science and Its Critics
• 4 Cultural Politics of Digital Media Ecologies
• 5 Emotional Data Bodies
• 6 Empathic Cities
• 7 Global Economic Emotions
• 8 Anticipatory Ethics
• Conclusions
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index