The study of emotion in GIScience: status and prospects

ABSTRACT

The study of emotion has gained increasing interest from the GIScience community. A wide range of methods, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches and sensing technologies, have been utilized to examine emotion and its connections with space and place. Through a comprehensive literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies in GIScience, this article finds that human emotions toward space and place are often investigated using interpretive, psychophysiological, and data-driven approaches; however a way to holistically understand them is still rare. This article suggests using a mixed methods approach to capturing the richness and complexity of human emotions. We also discuss the potential of a new sensing approach, Neural Sensing, which quantitatively studies human emotions toward geographic environments by integrating EEG-based emotions into GIScience, combined with qualitative methods to obtain contextual information. With this article, we remind GIScientists and cartographers of the potential research opportunities and challenges, and encourage them to develop novel methodologies to explore the unexplored terrain of our mental worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• GIScience
• methodology
• Neural Sensing
• mental space

Acknowledgment

The authors express their gratitude to both the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions. Jiaxin Feng extends her special thanks to Sarah Elwood, Ji-Eun Kim, and Jin-Kyu Jung for their support in the research progress. Any opinions in this paper are without directly implicating their contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no data were created or analyzed in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by any funding.