The study of emotion in GIScience: envisioning a new sensing method

Keywords: emotion, GIScience, epistemology, mixed methods, neural sensing
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The study of emotion has gained significant interest from the GIScience community. A variety of quantitative and qualitative methods and sensing technologies have been applied to examine emotion and its connections with space and place, while the inherent ontologies of emotion and the accompanying analytical approaches vary significantly. Thus, this article carefully teases out and examines myriad ways in which prior GIScience studies defined and measured emotion. It summarizes two primary perspectives, realism and social constructivism, and finds that emplaced emotions are often studied using realistic, interpretive, or data-driven approaches. The deep diving into the theoretical foundation of emotion highlights the research significance of mixed methods for emotion studies, and envisions the development of neural sensing technologies to capture the complexity of emplaced emotions. A pilot study is introduced to showcase how emotions can be sensed and integrated into the geospatial study with a new sensing method. This article encourages GIScientists to further discover the inadequately explored terrain of our mental worlds.