Emotional Development

Emotional Development

Emotional development is a lifelong process that includes the development of one’s emotions, the ability to understand their own and others’ emotions, and regulating one’s emotions. Emotional development occurs as a function of biological, cognitive, and social influences.

What are emotions?

An emotion is a subjective state of being that we often describe as our feelings. Emotions result from the combination of subjective experience, expression, cognitive appraisal, and physiological responses (Levenson et al., 1991).  An emotion often begins with a subjective (individual) experience, which is a stimulus. Often the stimulus is external, but it can also be an internal one. For example, if a child thinks about losing a treasured toy, he or she may become sad even though they still have possession of the toy.

Primary and Self-Conscious emotions

Infants display eight primary emotions that appear during the first year of life. By referring to them as primary emotions, it means that they are apparent early in life, are hardwired, universally present across cultures, and likely serve an evolutionary purpose.

Emotional Development in Infants and Toddlers

At birth, infants exhibit two emotional responses: attraction and withdrawal. They show attraction to pleasant situations that bring comfort, stimulation, and pleasure, and they withdraw from unpleasant stimulation such as bitter flavors or physical discomfort. At around two months, infants exhibit social engagement in the form of social smiling as they respond with smiles to those who engage their positive attention. Prior to this age, smiling is merely reflexive and does not occur in response to external stimuli. Pleasure is expressed as laughter at 3 to 5 months of age, and displeasure becomes more specific to fear, sadness, or anger (usually triggered by frustration) between ages 6 and 8 months.

Infants progress from reactive pain and pleasure to complex patterns of socioemotional awareness, which is a transition from basic instincts to learned responses. Fear is not always focused on things and events; it can also involve social responses and relationships. The fear is often associated with the presence of strangers or the departure of significant others known respectively as stranger anxiety and separation anxiety, which appear sometime between 6 and 15 months. And there is even some indication that infants may experience jealousy as young as 6 months of age (Hart & Carrington, 2002).

Stranger anxiety indicates that brain development and increased cognitive abilities have taken place. As an infant’s memory develops, they are able to separate the people that they know from the people that they do not. The same cognitive advances allow infants to respond positively to familiar people and recognize those that are not familiar. Separation anxiety also indicates cognitive advances and is universal across cultures. Due to the infant’s increased cognitive skills, they are able to ask reasonable questions like “Where is my caregiver going?” “Why are they leaving?” or “Will they come back?” Separation anxiety usually begins around 7-8 months and peaks around 14 months, and then decreases. Both stranger anxiety and separation anxiety represent important social progress because they not only reflect cognitive advances but also growing social and emotional bonds between infants and their caregivers.

Social Referencing

Facial expressions of emotion are important regulators of social interaction. In the developmental literature, this has been investigated under the concept of social referencing; that is, the process whereby infants seek out information from others to clarify a situation and then use that information to act (Klinnert et al., 1983). To date, the strongest demonstration of social referencing comes from work on the visual cliff. In the first study to investigate this concept, Sorce et al. (1985) placed mothers on the far end of the “cliff” from the infant. Mothers first smiled to the infants and placed a toy on top of the safety glass to attract them; infants invariably began crawling to their mothers. When the infants were in the center of the table, however, the mother then posed an expression of fear, sadness, anger, interest, or joy. The results were clearly different for the different faces; no infant crossed the table when the mother showed fear; only 6% did when the mother posed anger, 33% crossed when the mother posed sadness, and approximately 75% of the infants crossed when the mother posed joy or interest.

Other studies provide similar support for facial expressions as regulators of social interaction. Experimenters posed facial expressions of neutral, anger, or disgust toward babies as they moved toward an object and measured the amount of inhibition the babies showed in touching the object (Bradshaw, 1986). The results for 10- and 15-month olds were the same: Anger produced the greatest inhibition, followed by disgust, with neutral the least. This study was later replicated using joy and disgust expressions, altering the method so that the infants were not allowed to touch the toy (compared with a distractor object) until one hour after exposure to the expression (Hertenstein & Campos, 2004). At 14 months of age, significantly more infants touched the toy when they saw joyful expressions, but fewer touched the toy when the infants saw disgust.

Emotional (Self) Regulation

A final emotional change is in self-regulation. Emotional self-regulation refers to strategies we use to control our emotional states so that we can attain goals (Thompson & Goodvin, 2007). This requires effortful control of emotions and initially requires assistance from caregivers (Rothbart et al., 2006). Young infants have very limited capacity to adjust their emotional states and depend on their caregivers to help soothe themselves. Caregivers can offer distractions to redirect the infant’s attention and provide comfort to reduce emotional distress. As areas of the infant’s prefrontal cortex continue to develop, infants can tolerate more stimulation. By 4 to 6 months, babies can begin to shift their attention away from upsetting stimuli (Rothbart et al, 2006). Older infants and toddlers can more effectively communicate their need for help and can crawl or walk toward or away from various situations (Cole et al., 2010). This aids in their ability to self-regulate. Temperament also plays a role in children’s ability to control their emotional states, and individual differences have been noted in the emotional self-regulation of infants and toddlers.

With improvements in cognitive and language development during the first years of life, children become able to discuss emotions experienced in the past, and share anticipated emotions in the future. For example, a preschool-age child with strong self-regulation skills is likely to use words to describe their feelings rather than have a tantrum, and to ask for help when they need support with a challenging task.

As with most abilities, emotion regulation improves in middle childhood and adolescence compared to earlier stages. Older children have access to a wider range of strategies to help them manage their emotions. One such strategy is cognitive reappraisal, which involves reinterpreting an event to change its emotional impact. For example, imagine not being invited to a classmate’s birthday party. You might initially feel frustrated or left out. Using cognitive reappraisal, you could think, “My classmate only invited really close friends, and now I have more free time this weekend to enjoy things I like.” 

Additionally, metacognitive skill, the awareness of their individual thought processes, allows them to understand their emotions and develop strategies to help them control their reactions. These skills continue to grow in early and middle childhood (Gascoine et al., 2017). However, regulating emotions is complex and requires a lot of skill and practice (Pennequin et al., 2020). So, during middle childhood, children may still struggle to handle their emotions, particularly when they are stressed or feeling overwhelmed by expectations (Moltrecht et al., 2021).

For many, adolescence is a time when the social world expands significantly. Not only do teens spend more time outside the home, both in school and at after-school activities, but their new reasoning capabilities, fueled by physical brain developments, make interacting with peers and non family adults a central means of development. They learn to recognize and understand their own emotions, including their triggers, strengths, and weaknesses, and they begin achieving self-awareness. They learn to control impulses, manage stress, and adapt to changing circumstances with the developing skill of self-regulation.

The major developments in the frontal lobe and limbic system during adolescence support the growing ability to exert self-regulation, the ability to manage and control behavior and emotions without outside assistance (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000; McClelland et al., 2017). This skill allows us to change or inhibit certain thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to achieve better outcomes (Baumeister & Alquist, 2009; Moilanen et al., 2015). Related abilities include task persistence, delayed gratification, self-monitoring, self-reward for progress, management of frustration and distress, and the capacity to seek help when needed (Murray & Rosanbalm, 2017).

Self-regulation increases steadily across adolescence, shaped in part by parental and peer influences (Farley & Kim-Spoon, 2014). Caregivers regulate a child’s behavior and provide an initial set of expectations and guidance. As an adolescent develops and exhibits self-control, caregivers can reduce the amount of explicit regulation support they provide. A good-quality parent-adolescent relationship predicts good self-regulatory skills in the developing teen. However, this influence can work both ways, and a teen having difficulty regulating their emotions or behaviors will likely contribute to a difficult parent-teen relationship. Caregivers can model many of the same emotion regulation and self-regulation techniques you’ve learned about to help adolescents improve their own regulation skills. However, they can also begin to reduce their support while offering helpful reminders of emotion-regulation tools when frustration levels seem too high (Murray & Rosanbalm, 2017). For example, if a teen seems frustrated with a challenging homework assignment and is about to give up, a caregiver might remind them of the value of taking a short break, eating a snack, and then breaking the homework down into smaller steps.

Positive peer relationships are also an important predictor for, and outcome of, good self-regulation skills, including emotional self-regulation. This influence also goes both ways. Teens who exhibit strong self-regulation skills have been found to form caring, close friendships with peers. In turn, these close peer relations can help to support and reinforce self-regulation (Scholte & Van Aken, 2006; Meldrum & Hay, 2012).

The Role of Parents in Emotion Regulation

Parents are key in coaching children in learning to regulate their emotions. John Gottman et al. (1996) identified different parenting styles in terms of how parents teach children to regulate their emotions.

From birth, parents are helping infants regulate their emotions. We know that parents are critical in the development of emotion regulation. They can teach children various strategies to cope with an array of emotional situations. This is considered extrinsic emotional control, as a child is coached on how to self-sooth when sad or control oneself when angry. While parents continue to play this role throughout their children’s life, over time, much of this extrinsic emotional control becomes internalized. Children know how to control their anger or gracefully lose when the soccer game does not go their way. Brain development (especially the prefrontal cortex), cognitive development, and language development all play a role in the development of emotion regulation.

In summary, emotion regulation begins at birth and is largely extrinsic. Parents teach emotion regulation and being an emotion coach is the most successful and effective way to do so. Across childhood, this extrinsic emotion regulation becomes internalized. Finally, emotion regulation is key for academic and relationship success.

Emotional intelligence

The concept of emotional intelligence was introduced in the 60s and rose in popularity with the release of Daniel Goleman’s 2005 book Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more than IQ. Emotional Intelligence (EI) can be generally defined as how we perceive, communicate, regulate, and understand our own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. Investigations of EI in children have suggested that a higher EI level appears to be an important predictive factor of health-related outcomes, such as improved well-being and social interactions during development (Andrei et al., 2014), as well as fewer somatic complaints (e.g., Jellesma et al., 2011). EI appears to have a positive impact on children’s adaptive capacities (Mavroveli et al., 2008; Davis & Humphrey, 2012).  A number of studies on EI through childhood have been conducted within educational settings; showing that EI can be important for positive adaptation within the classroom, with particular implications for social-emotional competencies and for consequent adaptive behaviors with peers (Frederickson et al., 2012). For instance, Petrides et al. (2004) showed that pupils with high EI scores were less likely to be expelled from their schools and had a lower frequency of unauthorized absences. Additional studies revealed that high EI scores were positively associated with multiple peer ratings for prosocial behavior (Mavroveli et al., 2009). Moreover, data from self-report surveys revealed that a high EI is negatively related to bullying (Mavroveli & Sánchez-Ruiz, 2011), and victimization attitude (Kokkinos & Kipritsi, 2012), and behavioral problems in general (Poulou, 2014). Overall, high EI (especially in the ability to regulate emotions) is associated with several positive outcomes for children.

Self-Control and Emotional Intelligence

In early childhood that we see the start of self-control, which is the ability to regulate one’s emotions, behaviors, and impulses. This is a process that takes many years to fully develop. Although many emotional milestones are accomplished in the first two years of life, there are many emotional tasks beyond a toddler’s ability. For instance, one form of self-control called delay of gratification, which is the ability to resist a smaller, immediate reward for a larger reward later, requires children to regulate their excited emotions to stay calm, will not start to develop until four years of age.

Video 10.1 Marshmallow Test

Mischel designed a study to assess self-control using a delay of gratification task in young children. In the marshmallow study, Mischel and his colleagues placed a preschool child in a room with one marshmallow on the table. The child was told that he could either eat the marshmallow now or wait until the researcher returned to the room and then he could have two marshmallows (Mischel et al., 1972). This was repeated with hundreds of preschoolers. The results showed that young children differ in their degree of self-control. Mischel and his colleagues continued to follow this group of preschoolers through high school and found that the children who had more self-control in preschool (the ones who waited for the bigger reward) were more successful in high school. They had higher SAT scores, had positive peer relationships, and were less likely to have substance abuse issues; as adults, they also had more stable marriages (Mischel et al., 1989; Mischel et al., 2011). On the other hand, those children who had poor self-control in preschool (the ones who grabbed the one marshmallow) were not as successful in high school, and they were found to have academic and behavioral problems.

Studies show that there is a positive correlation between self-control and emotion intelligence, although it is weak. This correlation is likely a function of self-regulation, which is necessary for both self-control and emotional intelligence.