Affective Bubbles and Political Emotions

Epistemic bubbles are informational structures that restrict a thinker’s access to a full range of relevant sources, giving rise to a narrow and one-sided doxastic perspective (Nguyen 2020). Here, I introduce the parallel concept of an affective bubble: a socio-informational structure that impinges in distinctive ways upon its occupants’ emotional states. Affective bubbles, which arise in both online and offline space, can undermine the fittingness, justification, and authenticity of an agent’s emotions by harnessing psychological mechanisms of attention, self-regulation, and imagination.