Shared emotions

Abstract

Existing scientific concepts of group or shared or collective emotion fail to appreciate several elements of collectivity in such emotions. Moreover, the idea of shared emotions is threatened by the individualism of emotions that comes in three forms: ontological, epistemological, and physical. The problem is whether or not we can provide a plausible account of “straightforwardly shared” emotions without compromising our intuitions about the individualism of emotions. I discuss two philosophical accounts of shared emotions that explain the collectivity of emotions in terms of their intentional structure: Margaret Gilbert's plural subject account, and Hans Bernhard Schmid's phenomenological account. I argue that Gilbert's view fails because it relegates affective experience into a contingent role in emotions and because a joint commitment to feel amounts to the creation of a feeling rule rather than to an emotion. The problems with Schmid's view are twofold: first, a phenomenological fusion of feelings is not necessary for shared emotions and second, Schmid is not sensitive enough to different forms of shared concerns. I then outline my own typology that distinguishes between weakly, moderately, and strongly shared emotions on the basis of the participants’ shared concerns of different degree of collectivity, on the one hand, and the synchronization of their emotional responses, on the other hand. All kind of shared emotions in my typology are consistent with the individualism of emotions, while the question about “straightforward sharing” is argued to be of secondary importance.

Keywords:

• shared emotions
• shared concerns
• Gilbert
• Schmid
• Tuomela

Notes

Schmid's argument about affective individualism is actually cast in terms of feelings rather than emotions. However, the terminological difference is not relevant, because Schmid understands emotions as intentional feelings.

The main adherents of the phenomenological or perceptual approach include Goldie (2000), Tappolet (2000), Helm (2001), Roberts (2003), and Döring (2004).

Gilbert presents an analogous account of collective remorse in Gilbert (2000).

The concept of feeling rule was introduced by the sociologist Hochschild (1983) who argued that feeling rules govern emotional exchanges in all domains of social life, both private and public. They set criteria for the proper duration, strength, time, and placement of emotions in particular social situations and roles, such as between spouses, best friends, parents and children, superiors and subordinates, or customers and salespersons. Hochschild was mainly concerned with the negative consequences of emotion management in accordance with commercially motivated feeling rules in service professions. However, there are other social groups in private or even public life whose feeling rules are more freely negotiable between the group members. Here, a joint commitment to feel may function as a way of creating group-social feeling rules for the group members.

Gilbert has admitted in a private discussion that this is a valid criticism of her view in so far as feeling rules are understood in a context- and situation-specific sense, not as constituents of certain social roles.

Goldie's theory of emotions is actually more cognitivist than Schmid presents, for Goldie (2000) characterizes feelings toward in cognitive terms as “thinking with feeling” and renders emotions as complex episodes that typically include perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of various kinds.

Konzelmann Ziv (2010) presented a similar argument against phenomenologically collective we-feelings in her presentation “We-mode feeling – between experience and attribution” at Collective Intentionality VII conference in Basel, 23–26 August 2010. She suggested that experiential I-mode and we-mode awareness “regulate a feeling's momentary closure of subjecthood in the way a zoom lens regulates the momentary closure of a perspective… [as] a function of the situational parameters”.

Roberts who renders emotions as “concern-based construals” do not talk about emotional appraisals himself.

In a nutshell, Tuomela's (2007) three necessary and jointly sufficient criteria for we-mode collectivity are the presence of an authoritative group reason (the satisfaction of) a collectivity condition, and group-based collective commitment.

I am grateful to Maj and RaimoTuomela for their constructive comments that helped me to clarify my discussion on strongly shared concerns without explicit collective acceptance.

Collins applies the notions of “mood,” “emotion,” and “feeling” as coextensive. Here is a striking example: “Members share a common mood. It is unessential what emotion is present at the outset. The feelings may be anger, friendliness, enthusiasm, fear, sorrow, or many others” (Collins 2004, 107–8; my italics). Philosophically, this is confusing because it is widely agreed that feelings, emotions, and moods are affective states of subtly different kind and therefore cannot be readily equated (Ben-Ze'ev 2000, 78–92).

I am grateful to Christian von Scheve for pointing out this difference between Durkheim's and Collins’ accounts of collective emotions.

I believe that shared emotions of different types have importantly dissimilar functions in social dynamics. For instance, I suggest that strongly and moderately shared emotions reinforce more robust affective solidarity between the participants of emotion than weakly shared emotions. Moreover, I hypothesize that strongly shared emotions are capable of motivating more reliable and resilient action in support of the group members’ shared concerns than moderately and, especially, weakly shared emotions. Indeed, shared emotions of the weakest kind, such as panic in the stock market, may inflict detrimental consequences to everybody who shares the emotion. On the other hand, even weakly shared emotions can sometimes awaken people's awareness of their convergent concerns, thus contributing to the transformation of their group from I-mode to we-mode. However, I must postpone a detailed discussion on the functions of different kinds of shared emotions to another article.

My thanks are due to the anonymous referees of earlier versions of this paper. Their insightful comments helped me to improve the article in many significant respects. Any remaining shortcomings are of course solely my responsibility.