DEADLINES:
Submissions Due: 30 January 2027
First Review Notification: 1 May 2027
Revised Manuscript Due: 1 June 2027
Final Decision Notification: 1 July 2027
Aim and Scope
The rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is profoundly reshaping the landscape of affective computing. As AI systems increasingly generate language, images, music, stories, and interactive responses, they are no longer merely tools for sensing or analyzing human affect, but active participants in shaping how people feel, create, learn, connect, and make meaning. This shift opens a new space for effective computing to study not only affective signals, representations, or emotional states, but also the affective and aesthetic experiences that emerge through human–AI interaction.
At the same time, the growing presence of GenAI in everyday life brings new social opportunities and challenges. GenAI systems are increasingly used in healthcare communication, mental well-being, education, cultural expression, accessibility, companionship, caregiving, and creative practice. In these contexts, affective experiences are not limited to immediate emotional responses, but often involve aesthetic and experiential qualities, including resonance, immersion, curiosity, engagement, inspiration, meaning-making, creativity, and human–AI co-creation. Understanding how these experiences are evoked, supported, evaluated, and responsibly shaped by GenAI systems is essential for designing technologies that promote social connection, inclusion, well-being, creative empowerment, and human flourishing, while also addressing risks such as over-dependence, manipulation, cultural bias, loss of autonomy, and unequal access.
This special issue aims to advance experience-centered affective GenAI for social good. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that examine how GenAI systems can support, enrich, evaluate, and responsibly shape affective and aesthetic experiences in socially beneficial contexts. Rather than limiting affective computing to the recognition or interpretation of emotional states, this special issue foregrounds lived experiences such as empathy, reflection, resonance, immersion, curiosity, engagement, meaning-making, creativity, and human–AI co-creation. By bringing together perspectives from affective computing, computational aesthetics, human–computer interaction, digital health, education technology, and multimodal AI, this special issue seeks to promote GenAI systems that are emotionally meaningful, aesthetically engaging, inclusive, trustworthy, and beneficial to society.
Topics of Interest We welcome submissions on topics including, but not limited to:
For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, visit the TAC Author Information page. When submitting your paper, please be sure to select the special issue or special section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal submission system and select the article type: “AEGIS: Affective Experience-centered GenAI for Social Good.”
All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review in accordance with IEEE TAFFC standards.
