People share their emotions on social media and evidence suggests that in times of crisis people are especially motivated to post emotional content. The current Coronavirus pandemic is such a crisis. The online sharing of emotional content during the Coronavirus crisis may contribute to societal value change. Emotion sharing via social media could lead to emotional contagion which in turn could facilitate an emotional climate in a society. In turn, the emotional climate of a society can influence society’s value structure. (...) The emotions that spread in the current Coronavirus crisis are predominantly negative, which could result in a negative emotional climate. Based on the dynamic relations of values to each other and the way that emotions relate to values, a negative emotional climate can contribute to societal value change towards values related to security preservation and threat avoidance. As a consequence, a negative emotional climate and the shift in values could lead to a change in political attitudes that has implications for rights, freedom, privacy and moral progress. Considering the impact of social media in terms of emotional contagion and a longer-lasting value change is an important perspective in thinking about the ethical long-term impact of social media technology. (shrink)

Philosophical work exploring the relation between cognition and the Internet is now an active area of research. Some adopt an externalist framework, arguing that the Internet should be seen as environmental scaffolding that drives and shapes cognition. However, despite growing interest in this topic, little attention has been paid to how the Internet influences our affective life — our moods, emotions, and our ability to regulate these and other feeling states. We argue that the Internet scaffolds not only cognition but (...) also affect. Using various case studies, we consider some ways that we are increasingly dependent on our Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” to regulate the contours of our own affective life and participate in the affective lives of others. We argue further that, unlike many of the other environmental resources we use to regulate affect, the Internet has distinct properties that introduce new dimensions of complexity to these regulative processes. First, it is radically social in a way many of these other resources are not. Second, it is a radically distributed and decentralized resource; no one individual or agent is responsible for the Internet’s content or its affective impact on users. Accordingly, while the Internet can profoundly augment and enrich our affective life and deepen our connection with others, there is also a distinctive kind of affective precarity built into our online endeavors as well. (shrink)

Online shaming is a subject of import for social philosophy in the Internet age, and not simply because shaming seems generally bad. I argue that social philosophers are well-placed to address the imaginal relationships we entertain when we engage in social media; activity in cyberspace results in more relationships than one previously had, entailing new and more responsibilities, and our relational behaviors admit of ethical assessment. I consider the stresses of social media, including the indefinite expansion of our relationships and (...) responsibilities, and the gap between the experiences of those shamed and the shamers’ appreciation of the magnitude of what they do when they shame; I connect these to the literature suggesting that some intuitions fail to guide our ethics. I conclude that we each have more power than we believe we do or than we think carefully about exerting in our online imaginal relations. Whether we are the shamers or the shamed, we are unable to control the extent to which intangible words in cyberspace take the form of imaginal relationships that burden or brighten our self-perceptions. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a fresh understanding of the sense in which emotions are evaluations. We argue that we should not follow mainstream accounts in locating the emotion–value connection at the level of content and that we should instead locate it at the level of attitudes or modes. We begin by explaining the contrast between content and attitude, a contrast in the light of which we review the leading contemporary accounts of the emotions. We next offer reasons to think (...) that these accounts face substantial problems since they locate the link emotions bear to values at the level of content. This provides the incentive to pursue an alternative approach according to which emotions qualify as evaluations because they are specific types of attitudes, an approach we substantiate by appealing to felt bodily stances. We conclude by considering two reasons why this approach may be resisted; they respectively pertain to the alleged impossibility of drawing the attitude–content contrast in the case of the emotions and to the suspicion that so doing raises qualia-related worries. (shrink)

In this paper we adopt Sterelny's framework of the scaffolded mind, and his related dimensional approach, to highlight the many ways in which human affectivity is environmentally supported. After discussing the relationship between the scaffolded-mind view and related frameworks, such as the extended-mind view, we illustrate the many ways in which our affective states are environmentally supported by items of material culture, other people, and their interplay. To do so, we draw on empirical evidence from various disciplines, and develop phenomenological (...) considerations to distinguish different ways in which we experience the world affectively. (shrink)

Grief is not a kind of feeling, or a kind of judgement, or a kind of perception, or any kind of mental state or event the identity of which can be adequately captured at a moment in time. Instead, grief is a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, which unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any particular time. (...) The pattern of a particular grieving is best understood and explained through a narrative account, and not merely through a causal account, for narrative accounts in such cases have powerful explanatory, revelatory, and expressive powers which causal accounts lack. Although I will not argue for it here, I believe that this view of grief can be generalised to other kinds of emotion. If this is so, then many philosophical accounts of emotion are at fault in identifying emotion with a kind of mental state or event. (shrink)

The thesis of the extended mind (ExM) holds that the material underpinnings of an individual’s mental states and processes need not be restricted to those contained within biological boundaries: when conditions are right, material artefacts can be incorporated by the thinking subject in such a way as to become a component of her extended mind. Up to this point, the focus of this approach has been on phenomena of a distinctively cognitive nature, such as states of dispositional belief, and processes (...) of planning and calculation. In this paper, we aim to expand the scope of ExM by considering the case for extended affectivity. We begin by clarifying the central commitments of ExM, before investigating its applicability to a range of affective phenomena, both dispositional and occurrent. We argue that proponents of ExM should also accept that the vehicles of emotions, moods, sentiments, temperaments, and character traits can extend beyond skull and skin. (shrink)

In this article, I provide a phenomenological exploration of the role played by narrativity in shaping affective experience. I start by surveying and identifying different ways in which linguistic and narrative expression contribute to structure and regulate emotions, and I then expand on these insights by taking into consideration the phenomenology of borderline personality disorder. Disruptions of narrative abilities have been shown to be central to the illness, and I argue that these disruptions are at the origin of a number (...) of alterations of affective experience. In particular, I suggest that due to the narrative “fragmentation” characteristic of the disorder, the emotions experienced by borderline patients are less differentiated and have a predominantly bodily and unregulated character. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes various ways in which language can act on our affect or emotion experience. From the commonsensical consideration that sometimes we use language merely to report or describe our feelings, I move on to discuss how language can constitute, clarify, and enhance them, as well as induce novel and oft surprising experiences. I also consider the social impact of putting feelings into words, including the reciprocal influences between emotion experience and the public dissemination of emotion labels and descriptions, (...) and how these influences depend on the power of labelling to make complex feelings visible and thus easily accessible. Finally, I address and reinterpret some psychological findings on the so-called “verbal overshadowing” effect. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to show with the aid of philosophers Edith Stein and Peter Goldie, how empathy and other social feelings are instantiated and developed in real life versus on the Internet. The examples of on-line communication show both how important the embodied aspects of empathy are and how empathy may be possible also in the cases of encountering personal stories rather than personal bodies. Since video meetings, social media, online gaming and other forms of interaction via digital (...) technologies are taking up an increasing part of our time, it is important to understand how such forms of social intercourse are different from in real life meetings and why they can accordingly foster not only new communal bonds but also hatred and misunderstanding. (shrink)