The Covert Control of Affective Computing: Psychological Manipulation Effects of Emotion-Based Personalization

Abstract

The deep integration of big data and the platform economy has triggered a fundamental shift in the application paradigm of affective computing, transforming it from a service-oriented approach to a control-oriented one. We critically examine the operational mechanisms and societal harms of affective computing as a covert control tool. First, we dissect its technological foundation: capturing emotions through multimodal data to quantify sentiment, then enabling predictive interventions into user psychology via dynamic modeling and affective matching algorithms. Subsequently, we systematically elucidate four core psychological manipulation mechanisms rooted in affective personalization: emotional contagion and atmosphere engineering, cognitive narrowing and information silos, operant conditioning and behavioral shaping, and decision hijacking and impulse exploitation. The research reveals that these psychological manipulation mechanisms constitute a comprehensive and profound erosion of individual autonomy, the foundations of democratic society, commercial ethics, and personal privacy and dignity. This paper calls for the establishment of an appropriate ethical and legal regulatory framework to harness technological risks and defend human agency in the digital age.