The Affect Institute is a research and convening institution advancing the science of Affective Intelligence — and the first systematic counterweight to the behavioral economics paradigm now governing how commerce, technology, media, and policy shape human life.
For half a century, behavioral economics taught that human beings are irrational — that what we call bias is cognitive failure, and that the ethical use of that failure is to nudge people toward outcomes others have decided are good for them. That paradigm is now governing how products are designed, how AI systems are trained, how regulation is written, and how trillions of dollars of behavior are shaped each year. The Institute exists because that paradigm is wrong — and because what is built on a wrong model of the human will not hold.
The Affect Institute conducts and convenes original research, produces documentary work, hosts working sessions for scholars and policymakers, and builds the next generation of thinkers operating from this paradigm. Each pillar is operational now.
The Institute conducts and publishes interdisciplinary research at the intersection of affective neuroscience, behavioral science, communication theory, psychoneuroimmunology, and AI ethics. Foundational publications establish the Ecological Affect System, the reclassification of bias as instinct, and the architecture of capacity-expanding versus capacity-compressing influence.
A feature-length documentary in production for 2026 release. The Affect Effect brings the Reformation of Reason to a public audience — examining the failures of the behavioral economics paradigm, the new science of affect, and the ethical reckoning underway across institutions that have built their operations on a wrong model of the human.
The Institute convenes scholars, policymakers, technologists, and institutional leaders working on the affective dimensions of AI mediation, behavioral regulation, and public trust. Working sessions, lectures, and roundtables are programmed to advance the field's vocabulary and produce shareable analytical work.
The Institute is building the next generation of scholars, communicators, regulators, and AI ethicists operating from this paradigm. Visiting scholars, fellowship programs, and a publication network are being established in 2026 to scaffold the field's emergence as a coherent intellectual and applied discipline.
The Institute is not an aggregator of existing behavioral fields. It names and advances a paradigm — a new model of the human that integrates the convergent findings of affective neuroscience, embodied cognition, psychoneuroimmunology, and systems biology into a single operational science.
Human behavior is governed by affect — not cognition. Affect is the biological, ecological, and relational signal-processing system that makes meaning possible at all. Cognition operates downstream of affect; what looks like a cognitive failure is almost always an affective adaptation operating exactly as designed in the environment that conditioned it.
The Ecological Affect System maps the layered relationship between biology, environment, relational history, and signal load — and produces a unified model that replaces both the rational-actor framework of classical economics and the corrective-bias framework of behavioral economics.
Just as chemistry's periodic table organized the elements into a predictive structure, the Periodic Table of Behavioral Affect organizes the field's hundreds of named "biases" into a coherent system of conditioned instincts on calibrated spectra. Loss aversion is not error; it is an adaptive instinct conditioned to a particular position on a survival spectrum. The Periodic Table recovers what the bias canon obscured: each item names a real adaptation, calibrated by environment.
The Institute is producing the formal publication of the Periodic Table for academic citation and applied use across leadership development, regulation, and AI ethics.
If communication is biological intervention — and the science is now clear that it is — then the ethics of influence cannot be separated from the biology of the audience. The Institute's third architecture distinguishes influence that expands the audience's capacity to reason, trust, and choose from influence that compresses that capacity through pressure, friction, urgency, and engineered cognitive load.
This is the operational ethics framework usable by product teams, regulators, AI labs, and communicators — and it is the through-line of the Institute's research program, documentary work, and convening agenda.
The Institute exists in present-tense operation today as a research and documentary institution, with a clear long-arc trajectory across the next decade. The vision is not metaphor — it is the institutional capacity required for a paradigm of this scale to be properly seeded, advanced, and integrated across the fields it touches.
A nexus for breakthrough research on how human beings actually function, the policy innovation that follows from getting the science right, the executive education programs that translate the science into operational practice, and the ethical advancement of AI mediation across the institutions that now govern public life. The work is operational today. The institutional architecture is being built across the next decade — through partnership.
The Institute is in active conversation with foundations, academic institutions, journalists, scholars, and aligned thinkers shaping the next decade of behavioral science, AI ethics, and institutional trust. Each pathway begins with a structured conversation about fit.
For academic researchers across affective neuroscience, behavioral science, communication, philosophy, AI ethics, and adjacent fields interested in joint research, citation, co-publication, or the Institute's emerging fellowship program.
Begin · ScholarsFor foundations and philanthropies funding work at the intersection of behavioral science, AI ethics, public trust, and institutional reform. The Institute welcomes structured conversations about program-aligned grants, multi-year partnerships, and field-building investment.
Begin · FundersFor journalists, editors, podcast producers, and documentary filmmakers covering AI ethics, behavioral science, regulatory change, and the institutional reckoning underway. Expert commentary, interviews, on-camera contribution, and citation support are all available.
Begin · PressThe Affect Institute was founded in 2024 by Elizabeth Edwards to institutionalize a body of interdisciplinary research developed across more than two decades of work — beginning at Boeing Rocketdyne and Ogilvy's technology infrastructure practice in the 1990s, deepened through Volume PR (founded 2001), and matured through applied work with Fortune 500 enterprises, healthcare systems, government agencies, and academic institutions across the United States and internationally.
Edwards is the originator of the Affective Intelligence framework, the PR 3.0 paradigm, and the Periodic Table of Behavioral Affect. She serves as President of PR Consultants Group, a national consortium of more than fifty independent PR agencies, and is a Lead AI Speaker for the Public Relations Society of America. Her work has been published in Forbes, featured in Progress, and presented to academic and professional audiences including the Society for Consumer Psychology, Arizona State University, the University of Oregon, Pepperdine, and PRSA national conferences.
The Institute operates as a research and convening institution with a founder-led intellectual program, an active documentary production, and a formal governance and advisory council expanding through 2026. The Institute's sister organization, Engagement Science Lab, conducts the applied research, audit, training, and advisory work that translates the science into institutional practice.
The Affect Institute is in active formation as a structured research institution with formal governance, advisory council, and 501(c)(3) classification expanding through 2026. Foundation partners and aligned funders participating in this formation period will help shape the long-arc institutional architecture described above.
The Affect Institute is in active conversation with foundations, academic institutions, journalists, and aligned thinkers shaping the next decade of behavioral science, AI ethics, and institutional trust. Begin the conversation here.