Sharing emotions

Over the past few years, an increasingly intense debate has developed around the notion of collective intentionality (or weintentionality). This debate, which involves not only philosophy but also many empirical disciplines, raises questions such as the ability of a plurality of individuals to share cognitive attitudes (beliefs, acts of acceptance...) or attitudes of conative nature (intentions, desires...). Yet, only recently there has been an interest in the sharing of emotions, which is already an important subject to most of the phenomenological tradition. However, assuming that a large number of individuals are able to share emotions, what meaning should be assigned to the term "sharing"? Must it be interpreted literally in the sense that, when a plurality of individuals shares an emotion, all involved subjects feel a (numerically one) emotion? Or is it a multiplicity of emotions that the various parties are mutually aware of? Or, again, is it maybe a multiplicity of emotions in an interdependent relationship with each other? This article briefly describes some of the approaches developed in literature on this subject. While maintaining a neutral position as for which approach is the most promising, I emphasize that the ability to share emotions is crucial to our social life, as it could be the basis of more complex forms of collective intentionality.