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Emotion regulation is one of the major foci of study in the fields of emotion and emotional development. This article proposes that to properly study emotion regulation, one must consider not only an intrapersonal view of emotion, but a relational one as well. Defining properties of intrapersonal and relational approaches are spelled out, and implications drawn for how emotion regulation is conceptualized, how studies are designed, how findings are interpreted, and how generalizations are drawn. Most research to date has been conducted from an intrapersonal perspective, and the shortcomings of this approach for understanding emotion regulation are highlighted. The article emphasizes major conceptual and methodological steps required for a fuller description of the process of emotion regulation.

Empathy is an extensively studied construct, but operationalization of effective empathy is routinely debated in popular culture, theory, and empirical research. This article offers a process-focused approach emphasizing the relational functions of empathy in interpersonal contexts. We argue that this perspective offers advantages over more traditional conceptualizations that focus on primarily intrapsychic features (i.e., within the individual). Our aim is to enrich current conceptualizations and empirical approaches to the study of empathy by drawing on psychological, philosophical, medical, linguistic, and anthropological perspectives. In doing so, we highlight the various functions of empathy in social interaction, underscore some underemphasized components in empirical studies of empathy, and make recommendations for future research on this important area in the study of emotion.

Emotion is a dynamic and reciprocal interaction; a psychological bridge connecting the goals of one person with the goals of another. While researchers of emotion have long sought to study the experience of the person on the emoting side of this interpersonal bridge, a chasm exists in our understanding of how emotion communication is responded to. This article attempts to highlight this gap and begin building the bridge between communicator and receiver.Crucial for emotion understanding is the individual's capability to appreciate and use the emotional communication of others to regulate their behavior and the behavior of others. In order for one to engage with and respond to an increasingly complex social world, one must discriminate the quality of the specific emotion being communicated (i.e., affect specificity) and respond with behaviors appropriate and adaptive to that specific emotion given the context (what we term functional affective responding). Providing care to an angry enemy is just as inappropriate as recoiling in horror at a friend's sadness. The development of functional affective responding to discrete negative emotions is essential if the individual is to take part in a relational world. This important skill is the basis of this article.To illustrate the importance of this phenomenon for theoretical and empirical research, we begin by emphasizing a functionalist framework for the study of differential discrimination and responding to discrete emotions. We then provide an overview of studies investigating the development of infant discrimination of emotion valence and discrete negative emotions. Next, we review the few studies that have contrasted infant behavioral responding to discrete negative emotions. We then use this review to propose some factors that may account for and facilitate the development of functional affect responding. We go on to propose the functions of behaviors we believe should be evident by infants' responding to discrete emotions. This will include providing examples from various studies that demonstrate the types of differentiated behaviors researchers have described in infancy and early childhood. Finally, we lay out some considerations and suggestions for future studies of differential responding to distinct negative emotions. Although much of the work reviewed in the following pages is rooted in developmental research, the principles highlighted are relevant to all investigators in the field of emotion. AbstractTo date, emotion research has primarily focused on the experience and display of the emoter. However, of equal, if not more, importance is how such displays impact and guide the behavior of an observer. We incorporate a functionalist framework of emotion to examine the development of differential responding to discrete emotion, theorize on what may facilitate its development, and hypothesize the functions that may underlie such behavioral responses. Although our review is focused primarily on development, the theoretical and methodological ideas laid out are re...

The acquisition of walking has recently been linked with infant language development (Walle & Campos, 2014). If this relation reflects the consequence of an epigenetic event, then it should be present regardless of when the infant typically begins to walk, the infant's culture, and the infant's native language. This study sought to replicate the previously reported link between walking and language development in American infants and investigate whether this relation exists cross-nationally in typically developing Chinese infants exposed to Mandarin. Urban Chinese infants not only provide a distinct linguistic and cultural population in which to study this relation but also typically begin walking approximately 6 weeks later than American infants. Our results demonstrated that (1) walking infants in both the American and Chinese samples had greater receptive and productive vocabularies than same-aged crawling infants, (2) differences between crawling and walking infants were proportionally similar in each sample, and (3) the walking-language relation was present for Correspondence should be sent to Eric A. Walle, Psychological Sciences,