title: Attending to emotions is sharing of emotions - A multidisciplinary perspective to social attention and emotional sharing. Comment on Zahavi and Rochat (2015).
abstract: Attending to bodily expression of emotions plays an important role in the human social world. It provides subjects with valuable information, constructs opportunities to act, and importantly, as Daniel Stern pointed out, it is involved in the constitution of the direct experience of others. Whether mutual or one-sided, these direct experiences, in which the subject can share the perspectives and attitudes of other subjects, always comprise one person's bodily expression of emotions that is available to another person. In this article I suggest that attending to other subjects' expressed emotions involves a special (social) mode of attention and emotional sharing. This suggestion challenges Dan Zahavi's view that confines the sharing of emotions solely to reciprocal experiences.
authors.affiliation: The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science an Ideas, School of Philosophy, The Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel. Electronic address: oren.bader@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Oren
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Bader
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D012938:Social Perception
keywords: Caregiving; Dan Zahavi; Emotional sharing; Expression of emotions; Social attention; Social cognition