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.

Jessica Pykett is professor of social and political geography and codirector of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Brain Culture: Shaping Policy through Neuroscience and the coauthor of Neuroliberalism: Behavioural Government in the 21st Century and Changing Behaviours: On the Rise of the Psychological State.