The study of emotion in GIScience: status and prospects

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.