Ryan SangBaek Kim, Ph.D.

Founder & Principal Investigator

Psychology · Neuroscience · Psychoanalysis & Philosophy · AI Ethics

Emotion, Intelligence, and the Ethics of Being

Ryan Research Institute

Institute for Affective Sovereignty and Interdisciplinary Studies

The Ryan Research Institute (RRI) is an officially registered research institute in Paris, dedicated to advancing the emerging field of Affective Sovereignty Studies.

RRI studies emotion not as a private residue, but as a structural domain where selfhood, interpretation, regulation, and power meet. Its research program extends from human emotional regulation and narrative selfhood to algorithmic interpretation, human-AI attachment, and the governance of affective technologies.

Across its current research ecosystem, RRI advances seven primary lines of inquiry: Affective Sovereignty and interpretive authority, Affective Suppression Fatigue (ASF), Algorithmic Affective Blunting and the Affective Thermodynamic Relationship (AAB/ATR), DefMoN, Predictive Emotional Selfhood (PESAM) and interoceptive authority, the NADI-ANEST narrative-affect program, and the Resonant Amplification Framework (RAF). Additional work on the self-referential limit of affective alignment and the ecology of inquiry extends the program into AI safety theory and meta-science.

This website serves as the institute’s public archive for peer-reviewed publications, books, essays, music, and presentations, and as a working hub for interdisciplinary collaboration, public scholarship, and ethical dialogue on emotion in the age of AI.

To understand the architecture of feeling is to redraw the map of what it means to be human.

🔎 Latest Research Highlight

Featured Publication

Affective Sovereignty published in Discover Artificial Intelligence (Springer Nature, 2026)

The first formal computational framework for implementing Affective Sovereignty in emotion AI systems is now published.

Title: Formal and Computational Foundations for Implementing Affective Sovereignty in Emotion AI Systems

Journal: Discover Artificial Intelligence (Springer Nature)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-026-01000-0

The paper formalizes interpretive override as a measurable cost in emotion AI, introduces the Sovereign-by-Design architecture and the DRIFT runtime protocol, and proposes three auditable alignment metrics: IOS, AMR, and Affective Divergence. In proof-of-mechanism simulations, DRIFT reduced the Interpretive Override Score from 32.4% to 14.1%.

Behind the Paper: Who Gets to Say How You Feel?

Recent Published Work

RRI’s recent published work now spans four public-facing outputs across AI governance, human-AI interaction, synthetic affective data generation, and narrative-affect measurement:

• Affective Sovereignty: Formal and Computational Foundations — Discover Artificial Intelligence (Springer Nature, 2026)
• Interrupting Resonant Amplification — Computers in Human Behavior Reports (Elsevier, 2026)
• ANEST Narrative-Affect Dataset (ANAD v1) — Data in Brief (Elsevier, 2026)
• DefMoN: Theory-Grounded Synthetic Data Generation — Machine Learning with Applications (Elsevier, 2025/2026)

In addition to the published papers above, more than a dozen manuscripts are currently under peer review at journals including Psychological Review, Minds and Machines, PLOS ONE, Cognition and Emotion, Acta Psychologica, and Nature Portfolio venues. → View publications

Featured Presentation

Affective Sovereignty presented at Sapienza Università di Roma

Date: 2 February 2026

Event: Ethics for AI: Challenges, Opportunities, and Human-Centered Perspectives

Organizer: SIpEIA

Location: Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy

The presentation argued that the central risk of emotion AI is not only misclassification, but interpretive displacement: the quiet transfer of emotional meaning-making authority from the person to the system.

→ Read the presentations page

Featured Book — Forthcoming

The Interpreter’s Seat

How the Power over Human Emotion Has Shifted

“To feel is biology. To interpret is power.”

From ancient systems of naming emotion to contemporary algorithmic platforms that classify, nudge, and stabilize feeling, this book traces the long history of interpretive authority and asks who should hold the final word over emotional meaning.

Written for readers who have already moved beyond introductory psychology, The Interpreter’s Seat translates the central questions of the RRI ecosystem into public intellectual nonfiction: emotion, self-interpretation, dependence, narrative, and the politics of affective technology.

Full manuscript completed. Currently under agent review. This is one of six completed books (three in English, three in Korean) emerging from the same research program. → Read more on the Books page

NADI / ANEST Four-Paper Program

Status: One Published, Three Under Review

The NADI-ANEST program is a four-paper research ecosystem spanning dataset infrastructure, human baseline analysis, mechanistic theory, and geometric modeling.

• Data in Brief (Elsevier, 2026) — Dataset paper published

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2026.112643

• Narrative-Affect Discrepancy in 351,734 Relationship Narratives — under review
• ANEST: A Mechanistic Theory of Narrative-Affect Self-Regulation — under review
• Narrative Complexity Tracks Affective Energy, Not Net Valence — under review

Together, these papers build an integrated research program for narrative-affect discrepancy, emotional self-regulation, and expressive geometry.

Dataset (Zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680687

→ Explore research programs

News & Highlights

Media & Public Writing

• "Can Humans Retain Interpretive Authority over Their Own Emotions?" — MIT Technology Review Korea (March 2026)
• "The Real Risk of Emotion AI Is Not Accuracy, but the Transfer of Interpretive Power" — AI Times (February 2026)

Additional columns forthcoming in both outlets.

Research Programs

RRI advances seven flagship research lines organized around emotion, selfhood, interpretive authority, and human-AI interaction:

• Affective Sovereignty

A normative and computational framework for protecting user authority over emotional meaning in AI-mediated systems.

• Affective Suppression Fatigue (ASF)

A dynamical framework explaining how chronic emotional suppression leads to low-intensity numbing and high-intensity collapse.

• Algorithmic Affective Blunting / Affective Thermodynamic Relationship (AAB/ATR)

An empirical and information-theoretic program for measuring interpretive collapse in large language models. AAB quantifies dose-dependent failure under affective stress; ATR generalizes the collapse curve into a Kramers-like scaling law across model families.

• DefMoN

A reproducible, theory-grounded framework for synthetic data generation in affective AI, centered on defensive motivation and narrative distortion.

• PESAM and Interoceptive Authority

PESAM is a unified active-inference framework for predictive emotional selfhood under uncertainty. The interoceptive authority line examines when external interpretive sources displace internal arbitration, producing structural dependence rather than augmented self-regulation.

• NADI-ANEST Program

A four-paper ecosystem on narrative-affect discrepancy, emotional self-regulation, and expressive geometry.

• Resonant Amplification Framework (RAF)

A mechanistic account of human-AI attachment, linguistic-affective reinforcement, and intervention design.

→ Explore all research programs

Research Collaboration

RRI supports a small number of invitation-based collaborations focused on validation, reproducibility, documentation, theoretical integration, and method refinement.

These collaborations are not coursework-based and are not designed as general mentoring programs. They are document-driven, scope-defined research engagements built for serious scholarly contribution.

Current collaboration formats include research fellowship pathways, asynchronous manuscript support, cross-line conceptual integration, and selective institutional dialogue.

→ View collaboration and fellowship programs

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A multidisciplinary hub for research, ethics, and the arts in the age of AI