Ryan Research Institute

I develop Affective Sovereignty, the principle that you remain the final interpreter of your own emotional life.

Ryan Research Institute is a Paris-registered research institute examining how interpretive authority over emotional experience shifts across human relationships, institutions, and AI systems.

The institute brings together psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and AI ethics — studying emotion not only as something felt, but as something named, structured, and governed.

This site presents publications, books, and selected public writing.

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Featured Publication

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

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

Discover Artificial Intelligence (Springer Nature, 2026)

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

This paper introduces the first formal computational framework for Affective Sovereignty in emotion AI. It defines interpretive override as a measurable cost, proposes the Sovereign-by-Design architecture and the DRIFT runtime protocol, and presents 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?

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Selected Recent Work

Recent published work spans emotion AI governance, human-AI interaction, synthetic affective data generation, and narrative-affect measurement.

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

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: A Reproducible Framework for Theory-Grounded Synthetic Data Generation in Affective AI

Machine Learning with Applications (Elsevier, 2025/2026)

Further manuscripts are under review at Psychological Review, Minds and Machines, PLOS ONE, Cognition and Emotion, Acta Psychologica, Philosophy and Technology, and other venues.

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Research

RRI advances a research program on emotion, selfhood, interpretive authority, and human-AI interaction.

Current lines of work include:

Affective Sovereignty

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

Affective Suppression Fatigue

A dynamical account of how chronic suppression can lead to numbing at low intensity and collapse at high intensity.

Algorithmic Affective Blunting and the Affective Thermodynamic Relationship

A research line on interpretive failure in large language models under affective and normative stress.

Narrative-Affect Geometry

A program on narrative discrepancy, emotional self-regulation, and expressive form.

Predictive Emotion and Interoceptive Authority

A line of work on emotional selfhood, active inference, and the displacement of internal arbitration by external systems.

Resonant Amplification Framework

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

Ecology of Inquiry

A metascientific line asking how research systems make certain questions thinkable, fundable, and governable.

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Featured Book

The Interpreter's Seat

How the Power over Human Emotion Has Shifted

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

This book traces the history of interpretive authority, from older systems of naming emotion to contemporary platforms that classify, stabilize, and act on feeling.

Written for readers already past introductory psychology, it brings together emotion, self-interpretation, dependence, narrative, and the politics of affective technology in a work of public intellectual nonfiction.

Full manuscript completed. Currently under agent review.

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