This article investigates the relationship between emotional sharing and the extended mind thesis. We argue that shared emotions are socially extended emotions that involve a specific type of constitutive integration between the participating individuals' emotional experiences. We start by distinguishing two claims, the Environmentally Extended Emotion Thesis and the Socially Extended Emotion Thesis (Section 1). We then critically discuss some recent influential proposals about the nature of shared emotions (Section 2). Finally, in Section 3, we motivate two conditions that an account of shared emotions ought to accommodate: (i) Reciprocal Other-awareness, and (ii) Integration. Consideration of (ii) and discussion of relational accounts of joint attention, lead us to the proposal that a construal of socially extended emotions in terms of a constitutive integration of the participating individuals' experiences is more promising than proposals that simply appeal to various forms of social situatedness, embeddedness, or scaffolding.

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Autism spectrum condition (henceforth ASC) is a complex psychopathological condition characterized by repetitive and restricted patterns of behaviors, as well as by impairments in social interaction and communication. This article focuses on the idea that ASC involves impairments in the capacity to connect with the feelings and actions of others. The metaphor of social connectedness might be considered somewhat uninformative, hardly specific of ASC, and ultimately compatible with a variety of competing approaches to social impairments in ASC. Nevertheless, here I develop an account of social connectedness which plays a distinctive and informative role in further understanding ASC. My strategy is to explore the role of social reciprocity in relation to the difficulties that persons with ASC have with social connectedness. Drawing on the work of Peter Hobson, I propose that such difficulties primarily involve experiences and actions that require the uptake or response from another subject for their fulfillment. I clarify and develop this idea by introducing the concept of minimal social act, inspired by the work of the phenomenologists Adolf Reinach and Dietrich von Hildebrand, and by discussing some 4E (i.e., embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended) approaches to ASC. On the current proposal, minimal social acts are pervasive and developmentally critical experiences that have built into their conditions of success a receptiveness or responsiveness from the subject to whom they are directed.

In this article I explore the relationship between the self and the experience of shame. Drawing mainly on contributions fromthe classical phenomenological tradition, I seek to make sense of the idea that the self of shame is a globally involved self, leaving aside any mysterious connotations that the latter notion might involve. To this end, I suggest a distinction between a property- based and a structure-based account of the self of shame. According to the latter, the self of shame is typically experienced as globally involved to the extent that it reaches an acute sense of its own individuation as an irreducible self vis-_-vis others, that is, as a self whose particular situation in the world is not ascribable to another self.