Affective Sovereignty and Uniqueness Violation in Emotion AI Systems

As emotion AI systems increasingly mediate our interpersonal interactions and shape our inner emotional life, the question of emotional sovereignty—who interprets, controls, and validates one’s affective experience—becomes critical. This paper introduces a novel interdisciplinary framework to understand how algorithmic inference, affective data extraction, and emotion simulation technologies risk violating the uniqueness and autonomy of human emotional identity. Drawing upon contemporary psychological theories of constructed emotion and philosophical concepts of posthuman identity, the study proposes a three-part ethical model for affective systems: interpretive transparency, design restraint, and identity-protective responsiveness. This work contributes to emerging debates on affective computing by reframing emotions as contested ethical terrain, not mere data points, and offers policy-relevant insights for designing AI that supports, rather than undermines, human emotional agency.