Emotions and the Extended Mind
Slaby, Jan – 2014
This chapter explores the idea of “extended emotion”: Can emotional processes be constitutively extended by environmental structures, social arrangements, interaction, and artifacts, in a way similar to how certain technologies and practices are capable of extending cognition or memory? This exploration calls both for a precise take on what emotions are and for a critical engagement of central assumptions of extended mind theory. It does both by drawing predominantly on phenomenology, and by arguing for a revision of the extended mind framework that draws on enactivism. The notion of phephenomenal coupling nomenal coupling is introduced to capture the dynamic embodied experience of being affectively “gripped” by a process or structure in one’s environment, most notably in face-to-face social interaction.