Progress in understanding the emergence of human emotion.

Abstract

In the past several decades, research on emotional development has flourished. Scientists have made progress in understanding infants', children's, and adults' abilities to recognize, communicate, and regulate their emotions. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered. We are poised to move from descriptions of aspects of emotional functioning to conceptualizing and studying the developmental mechanisms that underlie those aspects. The gaps in our knowledge provide numerous opportunities for further investigation. With this special issue of Developmental Psychology, we aim to stimulate such progress, especially among colleagues at the beginning of their careers. The articles in this issue are intended to challenge our concepts and take research on emotional development in new directions. Toward this end, this special issue includes empirical studies, theoretical articles, novel conceptualizations, methodological innovations, and invited commentaries from scholars across a range of disciplines. In this introductory essay, we briefly review the history of research on emotional development and provide an overview of the contributions of this special issue with thoughts about the current state of the developmental science and areas in which further advancement on emotional development must be made. These include understanding the nature of emotion itself, identifying the mechanisms that produce developmental changes, examining emotion regulation within differing social contexts, and creating measures of culture that acknowledge globalization, historical change, and within-culture differences.

Comment: How Your Own Becoming Feels

“…Understanding emotional development is both an important research endeavor in itself and a crucial way to constrain theories of emotions (see Dukes, Samson, & Walle, in press;Pollak, Camras, & Cole, 2019). proposes a framework aimed at understanding how emotions develop, with a particular focus on the development of anger.…”

KAPODI- The Searchable Database of 364 Available Emotional Stimuli Sets

“…Along with a rapidly growing interest in emotion research throughout the past few decades (e.g. emotion regulation (Gross, 2015) or emotional development (Pollak et al, 2019)), the need for ES has also increased. This is reflected in the publication of numerous ES sets.…”

The challenge of gathering self-reported moods: Cases using a classroom orchestration tool

“…The self-report data collected can potentially be used to assess the effectiveness of educational interventions [3]. However, individual definitions and usage of emotion and mood terms are often subjective despite objective definitions becoming more widely accepted [4]. A difference in how mood terms are defined and applied may affect the validity of self-report mood data when used for group comparison studies -and such studies are commonplace when assessing educational interventions.…”