Emotional sharing and the extended mind

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between emotional sharing and the extended mind thesis. We argue that shared emotions are socially extended emotions that involve a specific type of constitutive integration between the participating individuals’ emotional experiences. We start by distinguishing two claims, the Environmentally Extended Emotion Thesis and the Socially Extended Emotion Thesis (Sect. 1). We then critically discuss some recent influential proposals about the nature of shared emotions (Sect. 2). Finally, in Sect. 3, we motivate two conditions that an account of shared emotions ought to accommodate: (i) Reciprocal Other-awareness and (ii) Integration. Consideration of (ii) and discussion of relational accounts of joint attention lead us to the proposal that a construal of socially extended emotions in terms of a constitutive integration of the participating individuals’ experiences is more promising than proposals that simply appeal to various forms of social situatedness, embeddedness, or scaffolding.