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 independent research institute in Paris, dedicated to advancing the emerging field of Affective Sovereignty Studies.

Our work integrates psychology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis & philosophy, and AI ethics, while building bridges into law, business studies, and the arts.

We explore the deep structures of emotion, cognition, freedom, and human identity, with a mission to develop new frameworks for the ethical design of human-centered technologies and societies.

At the core of our mission lies a conviction:

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

This website serves as the official archive of our peer-reviewed publications, books, musical works, and essays — and as an evolving hub for interdisciplinary research, international collaboration, and ethical policy dialogue.

🔎 Latest Research Highlight

Featured Publication — Springer Nature

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 decomposes interpretive override as a measurable cost within emotion AI risk functions, proposes the Sovereign-by-Design architecture with DRIFT runtime protocol, and introduces three auditable alignment metrics — IOS, AMR, and Affective Divergence. In proof-of-mechanism simulations, enforcing DRIFT reduced the Interpretive Override Score from 32.4% to 14.1%.

Behind the Paper: Who Gets to Say How You Feel? — Nature Portfolio Community

Featured Event — International Presentation

Affective Sovereignty presented at Sapienza Università di Roma (2 February 2026)

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

Session: Accountability and Care

Organizer: SIpEIA (Italian Society for Ethics in AI)

Location: Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy

Date: 2 February 2026

On 2 February 2026, Ryan SangBaek Kim presented the framework of Affective Sovereignty at Sapienza Università di Roma, addressing a growing ethical risk in emotion AI: the quiet displacement of interpretive authority from the person to the system when emotional labels become records.

The talk argued that the central risk of emotion AI is not misclassification, but interpretive displacement—a structural shift in who holds the final authority over the meaning of one's emotional experience.

Core claims:

• Privacy protects data; Affective Sovereignty protects meaning.
• Emotion AI must be designed so that interpretation remains contestable by default.
• Systems should operate under three auditable principles: interpretive restraint, interpretive provenance, and user authority.

"The deeper risk is not that the machine gets emotions wrong — but that its answer becomes the only answer."

Verification & related work:

• Peer-reviewed foundation: DefMoN — Machine Learning with Applications (Elsevier) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mlwa.2025.100817
• Extended essay: The Night I Defended the Right to Feel
• Behind the Paper: Who Gets to Say How You Feel? — Nature Portfolio Community

→ Read the full event summary

Featured Book — Forthcoming

해석자들 · The Interpreters

How the Power over Human Emotion Has Shifted

"To feel is biology. To interpret is power."

From Babylonian priests who first named anger to the algorithmic feeds that now curate your mood — this book traces 3,700 years of interpretive authority over human emotion and asks who should hold the final word on what you feel.

A public-facing translation of five peer-reviewed research lines (DefMoN, ASF, AAB, RAF, Affective Sovereignty) into narrative nonfiction for readers who have already consumed the psychology shelf and still sense something missing.

16 chapters · 91 endnotes · theoretical appendix · glossary Full manuscript completed. Currently under publisher review.

→ Read more on the Books page

NADI / ANEST — Four-Paper Program

Status: Under Review

The full NADI–ANEST program — Dataset → Human Baseline → Mechanistic Theory → Geometry / State-Space Modeling —

has been fully completed and submitted across four top-tier venues:

• Scientific Data (Dataset Paper)
• Nature Human Behaviour (Human Baseline)
• Psychological Review (ANEST Framework)
• Nature Machine Intelligence (Geometry / Modeling)

Together, these papers establish the first integrated ecosystem for narrative–affect discrepancy, emotional regulation theory, and mechanistic modeling.

Dataset DOI →

Program DOIs Overview →

News & Highlights

Research Programs

RRI now advances seven flagship research lines, each representing a core dimension of affective sovereignty and human–AI cognition:

• NADI–ANEST Program — Narrative–Affect Discrepancy & Emotional Self-Regulation Four-paper ecosystem: Dataset → Human Baseline → ANEST Mechanistic Theory → Geometry / State-Space Modeling.
• Affective Thermodynamic Relationship (ATR) — Collapse Curve of Emotion Formal thermodynamic scaling law for normative–affective conflict and the Affective Degradation Index (ADI).
• Affective Sovereignty (ASov) — Formal Design Right for Emotional AI Sovereign-by-Design architecture, DRIFT protocol, and computational governance. Published in Discover Artificial Intelligence (Springer Nature, 2026).
• Resonant Amplification Framework (RAF) — Human–AI Amplification & Circuit Breakers Mechanistic model of linguistic–affective self-reinforcement and Cognitive Circuit Breakers. Accepted in Computers in Human Behavior Reports (Elsevier, 2026), in press.
• Predictive Emotional Selfhood in Artificial Minds (PESAM) — Computational Selfhood & Affective Priors Unified variational framework integrating affective precision, self-priors, and homeostasis.
• Defensive Motivational Nodes (DefMoN) — Language × Defense × Affect Theory-grounded generative framework and multilingual synthetic corpus. Published in Machine Learning with Applications (Elsevier). Includes the original DMN theory.
• Algorithmic Affective Blunting (AAB) — Collapse Curve of Interpretative Failure Includes the Affective Degradation Index (ADI) and junk-persona causal testing.

Explore All Research Programs →

Research Collaboration & Fellowship Programs

RRI operates small, invitation-based research collaboration and fellowship programs designed to support advanced scholarly work beyond standard publication cycles.

These programs focus on reproducibility, validation, documentation, and methodological refinement, and are structured around asynchronous, document-driven collaboration rather than coursework or mentoring.

Participation is limited to a small number of researchers per cohort, with clearly defined scopes, deliverables, and governance frameworks.

→ View current research fellowship programs

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