Year: 2026 | Month: June | Volume 14 | Issue 1
The Emotional Regulation Gap: Measuring Affective AI Literacy in Educational Discourse through the Aali Computational Index—A YouTube Corpus Validation of the Affective AI Literacy Model (AALM)
Theofanis Aritzis
DOI:10.30954/2322-0465.01.2026.3
Abstract:
The Affective AI Literacy Model (AALM) proposes that genuine AI literacy requires four integrated dimensions: Cognitive Decoding, Emotional Regulation, Ethical Discernment, and Technological Empathy. This article provides the first empirical corpus validation of the AALM by introducing the Affective AI Literacy Index (AALI), a computational metric measuring the proportion of empowerment markers in naturalistic learner-generated educational AI discourse, and identifies the Emotional Regulation Gap — the systematic under-representation of Agency markers relative to all other AALM dimensions in current educational AI discourse. A corpus of 829 YouTube comments was collected via the YouTube Data API v3 across five educational AI discourse domains (April 2026). Python-based lexical annotation applied marker patterns across six categories — Understanding, Agency, Ethics, Collaboration, Anxiety, and Rejection — grounded in Goleman (1995), Vygotsky (1978), Selwyn (2021), and the AALM framework. The AALI was computed as empowerment markers divided by total markers. The full corpus is deposited at Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19519080). The mean AALI is 0.8861, confirming that educational AI discourse is substantially empowerment-dominant. However, the dimension distribution reveals a critical structural imbalance: Cognitive Decoding dominates (0.7041 per 100 tokens; 59.7% of empowered comments), while Emotional Regulation is the least represented dimension (0.0940 per 100 tokens; 8.4% of empowered comments). Domain-level analysis shows that AI ethics content produces the highest AALI (0.9621) and AI anxiety/future jobs content produces the lowest (0.6609) — confirming that fear-framed educational discourse activates resistance rather than empowerment. The AALI is the first computational instrument for measuring Affective AI Literacy in naturalistic educational discourse. The Emotional Regulation Gap is an original empirical finding with direct curriculum design implications: current AI
© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
Print This Article Email This Article to Your Friend
