Affective Sovereignty : A Minimal Declaration on Emotional Interpretation Rights in the Age ofAlgorithmic Power: When AI Interprets My Emotions Before I Do, Can I Still Call Them My Own?

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly mediate human emotion—detecting our facial expressions, voice tones, and even influencing our feelings—the question of emotional sovereignty arises: who ultimately interprets, controls, and validates one’s affective experiences, the individual or the algorithm? This paper introduces a novel interdisciplinary framework to address how algorithmic emotion inference and affect-sensing technologies risk encroaching on the uniqueness and autonomy of human emotional identity. Drawing on contemporary psychological theories of constructed emotion and philosophical perspectives on posthuman identity, we articulate two new ethical concerns: affective sovereignty (individuals’ autonomy over their own emotions and their interpretation) and uniqueness violation (the failure of AI to respect the individual nuances of human emotional experience). Through an analysis of real-world emotion AI systems—ranging from facial expression recognition tools (e.g., Affectiva) to empathetic chatbots (e.g., Replika, Woebot)—we demonstrate how current designs can undermine emotional authenticity and agency. We further argue that existing AI ethics principles (privacy, fairness, transparency) are insufficient to safeguard our “affective self.” As a remedy, we propose a three-part ethical design model for emotion AI: interpretive transparency, design restraint, and identity-responsive feedback. This model reframes emotions as contested ethical terrain rather than mere data points, aiming to ensure that AI augments rather than erodes human emotional sovereignty. The paper concludes with recommendations for implementing these principles in technology design and policy, to protect what is fundamentally human in the age of emotional machines.