The onset of locomotion heralds one of the major life transitions in early development and involves a pervasive set of changes in perception, spatial cognition, and social and emotional development. Through a synthesis of published and hitherto unpublished findings, gathered from a number of converging research designs and methods, this article provides a comprehensive review and reanalysis of the consequences of self‐produced locomotor experience. Specifically, we focus on the role of locomotor experience in changes in social and emotional development, referential gestural communication, wariness of heights, the perception of self‐motion, distance perception, spatial search, and spatial coding strategies. Our analysis reveals new insights into the specific processes by which locomotor experience brings about psychological changes. We elaborate these processes and provide new predictions about previously unsuspected links between locomotor experience and psychological function. The research we describe is relevant to our broad understanding of the developmental process, particularly as it pertains to developmental transitions. Although acknowledging the role of genetically mediated developmental changes, our viewpoint is a transactional one in which a single acquisition, in this case the onset of locomotion, sets in motion a family of experiences and processes that in turn mobilize both broad‐based and context‐specific psychological reorganizations. We conclude that, in infancy, the onset of locomotor experience brings about widespread consequences, and after infancy, can be responsible for an enduring role in development by maintaining and updating existing skills.

Facial expressions of emotion are not merely responses indicative of internal states, they are also stimulus patterns that regulate the behavior of others. A series of four studies indicate that, by 12 months of age, human infants seek out and use such facial expressions to disambiguate situations. The deep side of a visual cliff was adjusted to a height that produced no clear avoidance and much referencing of the mother. If a mother posed joy or interest while her infant referenced, most infants crossed the deep side. If a mother posed fear or anger, very few infants crossed. If a mother posed sadness, an intermediate number crossed. These findings are not interpretable as a discrepancy reaction to an odd pose: in the absence of any depth whatsoever, few infants referenced the mother and those who did while the mother was posing fear hesitated but crossed nonetheless. The latter finding suggests that facial expressions regulate behavior most clearly in contexts of uncertainty.

This paper presents a unitary approach to emotion and emotion regulation, building on the excellent points in the lead article by Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue), as well as the fine commentaries that follow it. It begins by stressing how, in the real world, the processes underlying emotion and emotion regulation appear to be largely one and the same, rendering the value of the distinction largely for the benefit of analysis. There is an extensive discussion of how the same processes can generate emotions (i.e., are constitutive of emotion) and account for variability of manifestation of emotion in context (i.e., regulate them). Following an extensive review of many of the principles involved in emotion and emotion regulation, the paper presents implications for developmental study of infants and children, includes several methodological recommendations, and concludes with an analysis of the extent to which contemporary affective neuroscience contributes to the study of emotion and emotion regulation.

Makes explicit a reconceptualization of the nature of emotion that over the past decade has fostered the study of emotion regulation. In the past, emotions were considered to be feeling states indexed by behavioral expressions; now, emotions are considered to be processes of establishing, maintaining, or disrupting the relation between the organism and the environment on matters of significance to the person. When emotions were conceptualized in the traditional way as feelings, emotion regulation centered on ego-defense mechanisms and display rules. The former was difficult to test; the latter was narrow in scope. By contrast, the notion of emotions as relational processes has shifted interest to the study of person/environment transactions in the elicitations of emotion and to the functions of action tendencies, emotional "expressions" language, and behavioral coping mechanisms. The article also treats the importance of affect in the continuity of self-development by documenting the impressive stability of at least two emotional dispositions: irritability and inhibition.As Dodge (1989) noted in his comments opening this special section on emotion regulation, it has proved very difficult to define the inclusion and exclusion criteria that characterize human emotions. As a result, consensus about the definition of emotion eludes us. Nevertheless, working assumptions about the characteristics of emotion do determine the questions that researchers ask. Such assumptions illuminate certain phenomena and leave others in the dark; moreover, changes in such assumptions permit novel approaches to important yet neglected issues.In this article, we will argue that major changes are taking place in the conceptualization of emotion and will point out that some of the implications of these changes are not yet widely recognized. These changes focus on new ways of considering how emotions are elicited, what the functions of emotion are in the adaptation of humans to their social and nonsocial world, and how emotions lay the basis for important enduring personality dispositions (Malatesta, in press). Because Dodge has provided an excellent and succinct summary of the five articles that constitute this special section in his opening article, and because he has documented the interrelations among the five articles very clearly, the objective of this commentary will be to describe what we think is the Zeitgeist of which these articles are a part and to which they add impetus. We will also highlight important emergent issues in the area of emotional regulation that were either underemphasized in the articles or left out altogether. Our purpose, therefore, is to complement the other articles in this special section, rather than to review them.Emotion: From Structure to Function We mentioned above that even in the absence of consensus, working definitions determine the nature of the questions asked Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Joseph J. Campos,

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