Digital technologies that detect, analyze, and deliberately influence affective states such as sadness, anxiety, and pain are reshaping societal understandings of normality and pathology and raising fundamental questions about autonomy and self-perception. Technologies such as affective computing, virtual reality, neuromodulation, and smartphone-based real-time self-monitoring in everyday life (ecological momentary assessment) open up new possibilities for prevention, diagnosis, and therapy, while simultaneously giving rise to far-reaching ethical and societal questions.

The research project ShiftAffect investigates these developments by combining philosophical and ethical conceptual analysis and empirical research among developers, clinicians, and patients with participatory workshops into an integrative research design. The focus is on the affective states of sadness, anxiety, and pain, all of which occur on a continuum between everyday experience and clinical pathology, making them particularly well-suited for examining the shift in normative thresholds in medicine and society brought about by the use of technology.

ShiftAffect is funded over three years under the BMFTR funding guideline ELSA and is carried out by an interdisciplinary consortium of four institutions. The University of Cologne (project leader: Prof. Dr. Orsolya Friedrich) and the University of Münster (Prof. Dr. Claudia Bozzaro) are responsible for the philosophical and ethical analyses. The University of Tübingen (Prof. Dr. Kerstin Ritter, Prof. Dr. Andreas Fallgatter) conducts the technical and clinical-empirical research. ITAS is in charge of the participatory formats and the synthesis of results into recommendations with societal impact.

In this context, ITAS takes on the substantive and methodological lead for two central work packages. For the participatory scenario development, ITAS conducts exploratory interviews and focus group discussions with developers, clinicians, patients, and legal experts, and facilitates three sequential workshops in which contrasting future scenarios are jointly developed and evaluated. In the process, power asymmetries between professional actors and those affected are systematically reflected upon to ensure a dialogic scenario-building process that makes divergent values and lines of conflict visible. In the concluding synthesis and communication phase, ITAS coordinates the integration of project findings into policy briefs, ethical guidelines, and science communication formats, including podcasts, short videos, and an interactive exhibition. This combination of participatory technology assessment and translational science communication is the specific contribution that ITAS brings to the consortium.

The assessment frameworks, guidelines, and communication formats developed in ShiftAffect are directed at policy-makers, technology developers, healthcare providers, and the interested public. The aim of the project is to establish the ethical and societal foundations for the responsible use of affective technologies in medicine and everyday life.

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