Attending to emotions is sharing of emotions – A multidisciplinary perspective to social attention and emotional sharing. Comment on Zahavi and Rochat (2015)

•Sharing of emotions is not solely reciprocal.•Humans had evolved to share their world with others through expression of emotions.•This evolved predisposition develops in infancy through attention to other humans.•Emotional sharing involves neuronal mechanisms designed to follow others.•Sharing of emotions can occur in different degrees of intensity. Attending to bodily expression of emotions plays an important role in the human social world. It provides subjects with valuable information, constructs opportunities to act, and importantly, as Daniel Stern pointed out, it is involved in the constitution of the direct experience of others. Whether mutual or one-sided, these direct experiences, in which the subject can share the perspectives and attitudes of other subjects, always comprise one person’s bodily expression of emotions that is available to another person. In this article I suggest that attending to other subjects’ expressed emotions involves a special (social) mode of attention and emotional sharing. This suggestion challenges Dan Zahavi’s view that confines the sharing of emotions solely to reciprocal experiences.