Chapter 32: 3Es Are Sufficient, Don’t Forget the D

3Es Are Sufficient, Don’t Forget the D examines embodied emotions through recent research, demonstrating how somatic engagement, such as facial mimicry, acts as "social glue" and facilitates cognitive tasks like language comprehension and categorization, though it notes that embodiment is often a strong influence rather than an indispensable condition. The discussion advances to environmental scaffolding and the extended mind, analyzing how infant-caregiver dyads utilize synchrony to shape cognitive development, a process described as "contingent transcranialism" which aligns with Vygotsky’s theories of social-affective relatedness. Significant attention is dedicated to the enactive approach, which rejects the separation of emotion and cognition in favor of holistic "sense-making," viewing emotional episodes as dynamic, self-stimulating loops between an organism and its environment. Crucially, the author introduces the concept of distributed affectivity to describe collective emotions—such as panic in a crowd or the atmosphere of a family argument—where the emotional process is spread across a group without a single center, distinguishing this from the artifact-dependent nature of the extended mind. Finally, the chapter evaluates 4E perspectives on empathy, critiquing simulation-based and phenomenological accounts for potentially overlooking the affective or prosocial requirements of empathy, and suggesting that future research should focus on how social understanding is scaffolded by the environment and interactive dynamics.