Call for Papers: Special Issue on Affective Intelligence and Art Design

IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: April 2026

Art design serves as a vital medium for emotional expression and communication, distinguished by its rich emotional representation and profound impact on human emotions. It transcends being merely a visual and sensory experience; it is an important means to evoke emotional resonance and facilitate deeper emotional connections. In the realm of health and well-being as well, art design has been increasingly recognized for its therapeutic potential, particularly in the context of art therapy. By engaging individuals in creative processes, art design can help them explore and express emotions, thereby promoting emotional healing and mental health.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the intersection of affective intelligence and art design has emerged as a highly promising field. Through natural language processing, multimedia analysis, and emotion analysis, AI can now identify and simulate human emotions with remarkable accuracy. This capability significantly enhances the integration of affective computing and art design, opening new avenues for creative expression and emotional engagement.

Art design has the potential to create multi-sensory emotional experiences for audiences, helping them better understand and express their emotions. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and other dynamic effects, art design can create immersive emotional experiences that further enhance the diversity and depth of emotional expression. This interdisciplinary fusion not only advances the theoretical development of affective intelligence but also provides robust technological support for the innovation of art design.

This special issue aims to gather cutting-edge research at the intersection of affective intelligence and art design, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. We invite high-quality papers from scholars and practitioners in psychology, computer science, art design, and related fields to explore the theoretical and practical prospects of affective intelligence and art design. Consequently, potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

Art therapy and affective intelligence
Emotional healing through multimodal art integration
Applications of AI in mental health and emotional well-being
Affective computing in intangible cultural heritage design
The study on the correlation between design aesthetics and emotion
Music, audio, and text (lyrics, poems) in emotional art design
Affective computing for measurement of emotional art perception
Applications of AIGC (video, image, font) in affective computing
AI-driven emotional multimedia content generation
Multimodal art integration and emotional healing
Emotional impact assessment of AIGC multimodal content
Emotional intelligence and art design in virtual and augmented reality
Emotional intelligence in social robots
Usability engineering in affective art design

Types of Contributions:

The TAC recognizes novel contributions of the following types within its area:

Empirical Research: Data-driven research, including new experimental results and datasets, that explores the application of affective intelligence in art design.

Methodology: Theories and methods of affective intelligence for processing emotional expression and interaction in art design.

Software: New software implementations and toolboxes for affective intelligence and art design.

Datasets: Datasets related to affective intelligence and art design, providing valuable resources for researchers.

Tutorials: Tutorials on affective intelligence and art design, covering the use of specific tools, methods, and datasets for research, application of affective intelligence technologies in practice, and techniques for using art design to influence emotions.

Review: Timely and comprehensive overviews covering recent developments in the field of affective intelligence and art design.

These fascinating research topics will attract the interest of researchers. We hope that new methods and application will be inspired and devised. And this Special Issue can be considered as a contribution in this evolving field.

Submission Guidelines

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 must select the article type: "Can AI Care? Affective LLMs for the Future of Mental Health."

In addition to submitting your paper to TAC, you are also encouraged to upload the data related to your paper to IEEE DataPort. IEEE DataPort is IEEE's data platform that supports the storage and publishing of datasets while also providing access to thousands of research datasets. Uploading your dataset to IEEE DataPort will strengthen your paper and will support research reproducibility. Your paper and the dataset can be linked, providing a good opportunity for you to increase the number of citations you receive. Data can be uploaded to IEEE DataPort prior to submitting your paper or concurrent with the paper submission. Thank you!

All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review in accordance with IEEE TAC standards.

Guest Editors

Kejun Zhang, Zhejiang University
Sicheng Zhao, Tsinghua University
Björn W. Schulle, Imperial College London & Technical University of Munich
Songruoyao Wu, Zhejiang University