Bridging the gap between emotion and joint action
This is a review paper that addresses the lack of integration between emotion and joint action research, which is incremental in synthesizing existing evidence.
The paper identifies a gap in understanding how individual emotions propagate in groups during joint action and proposes an integrative approach to bridge this gap, highlighting five research avenues in behavioral neuroscience and digital sciences.
Our daily human life is filled with a myriad of joint action moments, be it children playing, adults working together (i.e., team sports), or strangers navigating through a crowd. Joint action brings individuals (and embodiment of their emotions) together, in space and in time. Yet little is known about how individual emotions propagate through embodied presence in a group, and how joint action changes individual emotion. In fact, the multi-agent component is largely missing from neuroscience-based approaches to emotion, and reversely joint action research has not found a way yet to include emotion as one of the key parameters to model socio-motor interaction. In this review, we first identify the gap and then stockpile evidence showing strong entanglement between emotion and acting together from various branches of sciences. We propose an integrative approach to bridge the gap, highlight five research avenues to do so in behavioral neuroscience and digital sciences, and address some of the key challenges in the area faced by modern societies.