CFA--Workshop on Co-Experiencing Emotions

Workshop on Co-Experiencing Emotions

Organized by Heidi Maibom and the European Society for the Study of Emotions

Graz, Austria, June 8, 2022

Work on emotions typically operates with the tacit assumption that we experience one

emotion at a time. When we begin to feel an emotion, other emotions have already

run its course. On this picture, emotions are nicely delineated entities. The reality,

however, is different. We already know, from many studies, that emotions often co-

occur. For instance, when having done wrong, most people report feeling both shame

and guilt. When exposed to another’s suffering, they experience both empathic

distress and sympathy. Yet, psychologists focus on the emotion that is experienced

most strongly, and proceed to theorize as if it made no difference that other emotions

are experienced at the same time. A related issue is that of ambivalent emotions.

Instead of simply feeling attraction or revulsion, for instance, people sometimes

experience both. And yet, we theorize about emotions as if we only ever experienced

one at a time. Are we justified in making this simplifying assumption? Are we not

missing something important about emotions by proceeding as if they are always

experienced in isolation? How might we proceed to widen the study of emotion to

include co-experienced emotions? What effects might it have on how we think of

emotion? In this workshop, we want to address these issues.

We invite papers for this one-day workshop. It will take place in Graz in connection

with the annual conference of the European Society for the Study of Emotion (9-11

June). Presenters should be willing to publish their full paper in a special issue of on co-

experiencing emotions in PASSION: The Journal of the European Society for the Study

of Emotion.

Please send a 500 word abstract, by March 14 to heidi.maibom@uc.edu. You will be

notified by March 31 of whether your abstract is accepted.