PhD defence
Emotional Privacy: A Philosophical Investigation of Emotion Recognition Technology
- A. Prégent
- Date
- Wednesday 2 September 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden
Supervisor(s)
Summary
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being designed to recognise our emotions. From smart glasses and social robots to workplace monitoring tools and healthcare applications, new technologies claim to infer how we feel by analysing our faces, voices, movements, and other bodily signals. But what would happen if these systems became highly accurate?
This dissertation explores that question. Rather than focusing on the current shortcomings of emotion recognition technologies, it investigates their potential impact if they worked as intended. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, affective science, and privacy theory, the research examines the nature of emotions and emotional expressions and how they shape our social lives.
The thesis argues that emotions are not merely private inner experiences. The ability to control how we express our feelings is essential for self-presentation, social relationships, and social cooperation. Highly accurate emotion recognition technologies could undermine this ability by making our emotional lives continuously visible and interpretable to others.
To capture this risk, the dissertation develops the concept of emotional privacy: the ability to manage how emotionally legible we are to others. It argues that emotional privacy deserves recognition as a distinct moral right and should play a central role in future ethical and legal debates about artificial intelligence.
The research offers one of the first philosophical analyses of what a world with fully functional emotion recognition technologies might mean for society and why protecting emotional privacy matters.
PhD dissertations
Approximately one week after the defence, PhD dissertations by Leiden PhD students are available digitally through the Leiden Repository, that offers free access to these PhD dissertations. Please note that in some cases a dissertation may be under embargo temporarily and access to its full-text version will only be granted later.
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