Research on collective emotion spans social sciences, psychology and philosophy. There are detailed case studies and diverse theories of collective emotion. However, experimental evidence regarding the universal characteristics, antecedents and consequences of collective emotion remains sparse. Moreover, current research mainly relies on emotion self-reports, accounting for the subjective experience of collective emotion and ignoring their cognitive and physiological bases. In response to these challenges, we argue for experimental research on collective emotion. We start with an overview of theoretical frameworks to (...) identify a set of three characteristics of collective emotion. Based on research in cognitive and affective sciences, we then examine the corresponding candidate mechanisms. Finally, we highlight outstanding questions, review experimental evidence, and suggest ideas for future experimental research. (shrink)

Cognitive scaffolding is typically conceptualized in terms of environmental design which serves to offload, facilitate, or enhance the cognitive capacities of interacting agents. Recent contributions to the literature on scaffolding have noted that environmental design might likewise scaffold cognition in ways that undermine the interests of interactant agents—giving rise to notions of problematic or hostile scaffolding. Given the pervasiveness of social and technological scaffolding in contemporary life, the importance of understanding and assessing its effects can hardly be overstated. At the (...) same time, however, the very pervasiveness of scaffolding raises a challenge to the current criteria for evaluating its effects by comparison with agents’ interests. This is because human agents and their interests alike are themselves the results of various forms of social and technological scaffolding. This paper explores the relationship between scaffolding and the formation of agents along with their interests, as well as the implications of this relationship for evaluating scaffolding as being hostile, neutral, or beneficial. I will argue that the formative aspect of scaffolding imparts a degree of uncertainty to evaluations of scaffolding based on agents’ interests. I will then demonstrate the relevance of the formative aspect of scaffolding in evaluating and assessing the potentially pernicious effects of contemporary social and technological scaffolding focusing on the examples of servitization marketing models and social and vocational digital infrastructures. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the interpersonal support, i.e., scaffolding, that agents provide to one another to share emotions. Moreover, the main target of this paper is to identify those scaffolds and their features that effectively function to boost, support, or enable emotional sharing interactions. To do so, I engage with the “multi-dimensional framework of environmental scaffolding” proposed by Sterelny (_Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences_ 9:465–481, 2010). This framework highlights various types of environmental resources, including social and interpersonal factors, that (...) serve as scaffolds for human cognitive agency. Furthermore, the model identifies the functional characteristics associated with these resources, which significantly contribute to scaffolding cognitive (and emotional) performance and skillfulness. Mainly concentrating on social interaction, I argue that individual, familiar social interaction behaviors, shared references, and shared bodily-affective and habitual patterns scaffold the interacting individuals allowing them to effectively share emotions. By examining the functional relationship between these particularly interpersonal scaffolds and shared emotions, I suggest that we can better understand the complex, situationally unfolding dynamics and the versatility of conditions that can boost emotional sharing. As a result, my analysis reveals that there are different types of social interactional scaffolds that vary in familiarity, predictability, robustness, individualization, and mutual adaptation. These features boost and trigger emotional sharing in degrees and different functions and different degrees of these functional features; therefore, different types of social interaction scaffolds are required depending on the situation to situation. (shrink)

Prominent research programs dealing with the nature and mechanisms of interpersonal social coordination have emerged in cognitive science, developmental psychology and evolutionary anthropology. I argue that the mechanistic approach to explanation in contemporary philosophy of science can facilitate interdisciplinary integration and division of labor between these different disciplinary research programs. By distinguishing phenomenal models from mechanistic models and structural decomposition from functional decomposition in the process of mechanism discovery, I argue that behavioral and cognitive scientists can make interlocking contributions to (...) families of mechanism models representing a) what central forms of interpersonal social coordination consist in, b) what types of agents engage in such forms of coordination, c) what types of cognitive mechanisms give rise to such forms of coordination, d) how the operation of such mechanisms is modulated by the natural and social environments that the agents populate. Thus mechanistic philosophy of science can play a heuristic role in guiding the research strategies of scientists in different scientific disciplines in a manner that is complementary to the research strategies of scientists in other disciplines and thereby efficient from the point of view of the division of epistemic labor. (shrink)