Shared Emotions with Philosophical Explorations

In the article, Joel Krueger discusses some positive arguments about the strong shared emotions, its relation to shared beliefs and feelings as they should be debated in the philosophy of mind (Salmela, 2012). In his introduction, the author criticizes how joint actions and collective intentionality discussions have omitted the issue of shared emotions. He identifies this oversight as unfortunate omission since he defines emotions as an essential element that must be included when forming and maintaining episodes of collective intentionality (Krueger, 2015). According to Joel, collective intentionality like setting goals with friends is not considered neutral since they are assumed to be permeated with how people feel or their emotions. The author further discusses the idea of shared emotions. According to his assumptions, emotions can be shared the same way people share intentions and beliefs. He focuses on how the phenomena of emotion experience relates to self-regulation to explain the meaning of sharing emotions. 

Joel also talks about the idea of collective emotion which according to him and other sociologists, it is true that numerically single emotion can be shared with many subjects. To prove this idea, he mentions some social psychologists, sociologists, and phenomenologists like Tronick, Collins, and Scheler respectively as some of the people who have defended the idea. The article further talks about the concept of emotion regulation. According to the author, the characterization of emotion as a brief neurophysiological response beyond the control of people's conscious omits the degree in which people can shape their emotional dynamics (Salmela, 2012). As a result, he suggests that people should set their focal point on the connection between self –regulation and emotion experience to highlight the no reflective nature of emotion. He talks about other authors like James Gross who distinguished five forms of self-regulation to be attention deployment, cognitive change, situation selection and situation modification. To simplify the taxonomy of James, Joel subsumes them under two types of self-regulation that is; the embodied and distributed forms of self-regulation. In his discussion on the embodied self-regulation, he supports Parkinson's idea of defining emotions as complex phenomena with dimensions (Krueger, 2015). To clarify his point, he explains that when people look at these aspects, they are able to understand the role of regulative process in shaping people's characters and development. For instance, the appraisal dimension which makes people react because they have evaluated the feature of the situation, agentive dimension; which put people in a place of being ready to act; physiological dimension, expressive dimension; and phenomenological dimension. According to the author, embodied self-regulation happens when regulative strategies draws upon the subject-centered features of peoples’ embodiment like attention. He draws example s from different authors like Niedenthal to prove the fact that there is well-documentation of people’s capacity for embodied self-regulation. 

In his further discussion, Joel noted that not only do embody self-regulation shapes emotional phenomenology, but it also reaches down to other dimensions like appraisal and physiological activation. According to the author's reasoning, distributed self-regulation is another resource that is discussed. He explains that people need resources that lie beyond them to like the environmental tools to adjust their emotional phenomenology. This fact is emphasized by giving an example from Gross's argument that apart people need to manipulate specific features of situations as much as they select situations based on their emotional impact. Unlike in Gross's discussion, Joel goes further and explains the aspect of situation modification (Krueger, 2015). This is where he brings in the idea of emotional off-loading where we allow the environmental features to perform for us some of the emotional work hence enabling us to enjoy their regulatory input. He talks about music and people as some of the factors that change the states of our emotion. Music, for instance, is described to influence our emotions through helping us offload some activities of the regulation emotions on the musical rhythms. Krueger explains the importance of music in the regulation of the emotions. 

Evidently, he shows an example of the use of music in situational modification through its intentional use to create a specific atmosphere that changes the emotional state of those who are listening. The further illustrates how music modifies the environment by crafting a sonic atmosphere that creates a new feeling within a situation (Salmela, 2012). He also talks about DeNora's argument about music. The article says that she sees music as the aesthetic technology that enables us load-off some regulatory work hence making us have some new experiences. In his discussion, Krueger defines entertainment as situations where two or more processes that depend on each other coordinate gradually towards a common phase. However, the author suggests people as another instance of self-regulation that can also help in the off-loading. Joel reasons that when people coordinate actions, intentions, emotions, and beliefs towards achieving a common objective, they will be able to share their feelings and emotions as compared to other strategies in the distributed self-regulation. He pinpoints that unlike the environmental resources, collective intentionality is so inclusive and conscious of other subjects.

In his discussion on shared emotions, the author identifies different ways in which feelings can be shared (Salmela, 2015). The first example he gives is that emotions can be shared expressively through the use gestures, facial expressions and other forms of verbal reports. He argues that emotions can also be shared contagiously and with collective emotion. On his further argument, Joel explains Scheler's, ideas on shared emotions, particularly on grief. From Scheler's story, he discusses how Scheler sets up her case by first by showing that there was a coordinated bodily intimacy between the parent and dead child. The parents of the child are said to be having a narrative intimacy with the child being the object of their mutual grief. He says that this argument is relevant because such behaviors support the coordination of emotions between those who are interacting which identifies how these individuals have a mutual understanding and connection. Joel supports this idea by arguing that leaning on someone when grieving makes people feel open and ready to share their feeling and emotions with others through interpersonally distributed regulation (Krueger, 2015). However, he contradicts Scheler by saying that when the grief continues for some time, the inhibitory resources becomes weakened hence will increase their suffering due to the trigger from the environment. The author finishes by giving his final thoughts. He says that collective intentionality increases the effectiveness of the ongoing discussion by manipulating the individuals to share their emotions.

Conclusion

In my opinion, Scheler’s example could provide credible information if the story was explained more efficiently. The author was shallow, and as much as he tried to support the idea, he talked more about how Scheler’s argument did not help the collective emotion. If everyone in the environment continues with grieving, people will be free to share their feelings and emotions with each other, and after some time they will become even much closer. The author failed to expound on this, and this calls for a question of what will happen when this relationship continues to grow stronger and if this connection will promote collective intentionality. The author also failed to bring out the differences between collective emotion and collective intentionality and how they can be integrated together in the sharing emotions with others. The question remains on whether this can be effective in emotional off-loading.

References

Krueger, J. (2015). The Affective" We": Self-regulation and Shared Emotions. Routledge.

Salmela, M. (2012). Shared emotions.  Philosophical explorations ,  15 (1), 33-46.