Joint commitment: An analysis of emotions and non-verbal behaviors

According to Margaret Gilbert, a joint commitment (JC) is a commitment of two or more agents, called the parties of the JC, to engage in a common project. Creating a JC often involves an explicit agreement, carried out in a conversa-tional interaction through overt communication. We ex-plored aspects of such interactions that can be considered as complementary to verbal exchanges, focusing on how a JC is managed by the parties by means of emotional and other non-verbal bodily expressions. We analyzed three phases of the JC lifecycle (creation, maintenance, and violation), and in particular the emotional reaction of the participants to two types of violations by the experimenter. In our analysis we used standardized tools such as the Ethological Coding System for Interviews, the Mind Reading Emotional Library, and the Facial Action Coding System. Our results show that certain non-verbal behaviors in the phase of JC creation are characteristic of the participants who later did not fulfill their commitment. Moreover, the participants’ emotional reactions to JC violation by the experimenter turned out to depend on the type of violation. Finally, the creation and maintenance of JC, and the emotional reaction to its violation, appear to be independent of the participants’ personality and empathic disposition

Emotion and ethics: an inter-(en)active approach

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comIn this paper we start exploring the affective and ethical dimension of what De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) have called ‘participatory sense-making’. In the first part, we distinguish various ways in which we are, and feel, affectively inter-connected in interpersonal encounters. In the second part, we discuss the ethical character of this affective interconnectedness, as well as the implications that taking an ‘inter-(en)active approach’ has for ethical theory itself

Placebo from an enactive perspective

Due to their complexity and variability, placebo effects remain controversial. We suggest this is also due to a set of problematic assumptions (dualism, reductionism, individualism, passivity). We critically assess current explanations and empirical evidence and propose an alternative theoretical framework—the enactive approach to life and mind—based on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. We review core enactive concepts such as autonomy, agency, and sense-making. Following these ideas, we propose a move from binary distinctions (e.g., conscious vs. non-conscious) to the more workable categories of reflective and pre-reflective activity. We introduce an ontology of individuation, following the work of Gilbert Simondon, that allow us to see placebo interventions not as originating causal chains, but as modulators and triggers in the regulation of tensions between ongoing embodied and interpersonal processes. We describe these interrelated processes involving looping effects through three intertwined dimensions of embodiment: organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective. Finally, we defend the need to investigate therapeutic interactions in terms of participatory sense-making, going beyond the identification of individual social traits (e.g., empathy, trust) that contribute to placebo effects. We discuss resonances and differences between the enactive proposal, popular explanations such as expectations and conditioning, and other approaches based on meaning responses and phenomenological/ecological ideas