SHARE · Shared Emotions, Group Membership, and Empathy

Shared Emotions, Group Membership, and Empathy

SHARE addressed three interrelated issue, revolving around the question of how empathic understanding of others’ mental and emotional lives relates and is modulated by emotional sharing and group membership. Specifically, it addressed three issues: (WP 1) The Shared Emotions Issue: The first, foundational, sub-project analysed how empathy relates but ultimately differs from properly speaking emotional sharing and provided a phenomenological account of what the latter amounts to. In particular, SP 1 inquired what components or dimensions of emotions are shared in emotional sharing (e.g., bodily feeling or experiential components of emotions, cognitive components such as social appraisal patterns, objective, emotion regulative or expressive components) and argued for multi-dimensional account of affective sharing. In particular, SHARE suggested four criteria for emotional sharing: (i) the (mutual) awareness and the intentionality, (ii) the plurality and self/other-differentiation, (iii) the integration, and (iv) the affective intentionality requirement. (WP 2) The Group-Membership and Empathy Issue: Based on the results of SP 1, this WP explored the ways in which shared emotions and membership in communities modulate cognitive and affective empathy, and, in particular, emotional recognition and regulation, Furthermore, it addressed the question whether there are certain in-/out-group biases at play in empathy. It has been shown that group membership indeed variously influences empathic processes. Specifically, the project showed how not only the familiar social-psychological mechanisms, but also passive ‘sedimentation’ and ‘habitualization’ of shared emotional patterns play an important and so far largely neglected role. (WP 3) The Interactive and Collective Empathy Issue: The last subproject focused on the issue of what happens when individuals interact in empathizing, whether and how they can collectively perform or be the targets of empathic acts (e.g., as a group which is marginalized, strives for recognition or which is victim of ethnic cleansing) and finally what inter-group empathy entails. SP 3 argued that interactive, collective and inter-group empathy are not only possible but, moreover, entail, respectively, a number of facilitating mechanisms vis-à-vis ingroup homogenization, a sense of belonging, but also, conversely, negative biases regarding ingroup/outgroup demarcation.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз