Algorithmic Understanding of Emotions: Social Theories and Computational Applications

Algorithmic Understanding of Emotions is a book that aims to build a bridge between politics, psychology, statististics, and computer science disciplines. Our substantive understanding of the role of emotions in politics has been debated for thousands of years; yet, our statistical understanding of the political world is quite young. It is not difficult to convince intellectual readers of today that emotions are important to understand how politics happen and policies are made. It is more difficult and possibly a challenge, though, to illuminate the explanatory or causal mechanism between emotions and politics. Challenges are multifaceted: there are conflicting psychological theories to categorize and analyze different emotions (i), emotions are difficult to measure because of the variety of ways they manifest themselves (ii), humans - as complex beings - represent themselves frequently in conflicting ways (iii), and - perhaps, most importantly - our algorithmic understanding of emotions is still at a nascent stage (iv). This book talks about emotions in politics in three sections. The 1st part offers an extensive discussion on the role of emotions in the world of politics and psychology, the 2nd part covers conflicting and confirmatory theories on and algorithmic approaches to analyzing emotions. The 3rd and final part offers empirical examples on the analysis and interpretation of emotions from established democratic countries and countries with authoritarian tendencies.