Abstract

Proponents of the “straightforward” view of emotion sharing hold that when two people share an emotion, they take part in one and the same emotion. When I share joy with another, for instance, the other person and I have the very same token joy. Despite this view gaining traction in contemporary philosophy of emotion, there are several points that its adherents have yet to address. First, Schmid (2014) and Thonhauser (2018 and 2022) make a distinction between participatory sharing and distributive sharing. However, more needs to be said regarding whether the straightforward view is consistent with sharing in the participatory sense. Second, there is a lack of clarity regarding the role that causal coupling plays, or ought to play, in a theory of shared emotion. Do causally coupled emotions provide proof of sharing a token emotion? León et al. (2019) argue that causal coupling, and mutual affect regulation specifically, does not give us reason to answer that question in the affirmative. In what follows, I draw upon the research of ecological psychologists–specifically, work on dynamical coupling–to provide a naturalistic defense of the straightforward view. In the course of doing so, I respond to the above issues. Not only does ecological psychology help us model shared emotion empirically, it allows us to see how the straightforward view is consistent with the participatory sense of sharing. It also gives us reason to think that a certain kind of causal coupling supports the token identity claim.