We (Still!) Need to Talk About Valence: Contemporary Issues and Recommendations for Affective Science

Valence is central to the experience of emotion. However, to the detriment of affective science, it is often ill-defined and poorly operationalized. Being more precise about what is meant by valence would make for more readily comparable emotion stimuli, methodologies, and results, and would promote consideration of the diversity, complexity, and function of discrete emotions. This brief review uses prior literature and an informal survey of affective scientists to illustrate disagreements in conceptualizing valence. Next, we describe issues of valence in affective science, particularly as they pertain to the emotion process, the functions of emotion, and precision in empirical research. We conclude by providing recommendations for the future of valence in affective science.

Somatovisceral influences on emotional development

Frameworks of emotional development have tended to focus on how environmental factors shape children's emotion understanding. However, individual experiences of emotion represent a complex interplay between both external environmental inputs and internal somatovisceral signaling. Here, we discuss the importance of afferent signals and coordination between central and peripheral mechanisms in affective response processing. We propose that incorporating somatovisceral theories of emotions into frameworks of emotional development can inform how children understand emotions in themselves and others. We highlight promising directions for future research on emotional development incorporating this perspective, namely afferent cardiac processing and interoception, immune activation, physiological synchrony, and social touch.

Signatures of emotional face processing measured by event-related potentials in 7-month-old infants

The ability to distinguish facial emotions emerges in infancy. Although this ability has been shown to emerge between 5 and 7 months of age, the literature is less clear regarding the extent to which neural correlates of perception and attention play a role in processing of specific emotions. This study's main goal was to examine this question among infants. To this end, we presented angry, fearful, and happy faces to 7-month-old infants (N = 107, 51% female) while recording event-related brain potentials. The perceptual N290 component showed a heightened response for fearful and happy relative to angry faces. Attentional processing, indexed by the P400, showed some evidence of a heightened response for fearful relative to happy and angry faces. We did not observe robust differences by emotion in the negative central (Nc) component, although trends were consistent with previous work suggesting a heightened response to negatively valenced expressions. Results suggest that perceptual (N290) and attentional (P400) processing is sensitive to emotions in faces, but these processes do not provide evidence for a fear-specific bias across components.

Early antecedents of emotion differentiation and regulation: Experience tunes the appraisal thresholds of emotional development in infancy

In this review, we synthesize evidence to highlight cognitive appraisal as an important developmental antecedent of individual differences in emotion differentiation and adept emotion regulation. Emotion differentiation is the degree to which emotions are experienced in a nuanced or "granular" way-as specific and separable phenomena. More extensive differentiation is related to positive wellbeing and has emerged as a correlate of emotion regulation skill among adults. We argue that the cognitive appraisal processes that underlie these facets of emotional development are instantiated early in the first year of life and tuned by environmental input and experience. Powerful socializing input in the form of caregivers' contingent and selective responding to infants' emotional signals carves and calibrates the infant's appraisal thresholds for what in their world ought to be noticed, deemed as important or personally meaningful, and responded to (whether and how). These appraisal thresholds are thus unique to the individual child despite the ubiquity of the appraisal process in emotional responding. This appraisal infrastructure, while plastic and continually informed by experience across the lifespan, likely tunes subsequent emotion differentiation, with implications for children's emotion regulatory choices and skills. We end with recommendations for future research in this area, including the urgent need for developmental emotion science to investigate the diverse sociocultural contexts in which children's cognitive appraisals, differentiation of emotions, and regulatory responses are being built across childhood.

Studying hot executive function in infancy: Insights from research on emotional development

Recent calls have urged to bridge the fields of emotional and cognitive development to advance theoretical and empirical pursuits. Yet, despite notable overlap between research on executive function and emotion regulation, a uniting theory that informs future avenues of research is lacking. Infants are known to lack emotion regulation skills, as they are developing the abilities to regulate their emotions and coordinated responses. However, the field of emotional development demonstrates that at an early age, infants are adept at regulating their behaviors in response to others emotional reactions. Moreover, although classic delay of gratification tasks are fairly ecological measures, rarely are rules expressed to infants without emotions. This paper draws from recent interest in hot executive function to link infancy research on executive function and emotion. Hot executive function lends itself as a useful construct in this endeavor because it unites the study emotion and executive function. We offer a perspective that refines hot executive function within prominent emotion theories while discussing infant executive function and emotion empirical pursuits. Our perspective presents reliable paradigms from the field of emotional development to serve as tools for studying the development of hot executive function.

Emotion Recognition in Preterm and Full-Term School-Age Children

Children born preterm (<37 weeks’ gestation) show a specific vulnerability for socio-emotional difficulties, which may lead to an increased likelihood of developing behavioral and psychiatric problems in adolescence and adulthood. The accurate decoding of emotional signals from faces represents a fundamental prerequisite for early social interactions, allowing children to derive information about others’ feelings and intentions. The present study aims to explore possible differences between preterm and full-term children in the ability to detect emotional expressions, as well as possible relationships between this ability and socio-emotional skills and problem behaviors during everyday activities. We assessed 55 school-age children (n = 34 preterm and n = 21 full-term) with a cognitive battery that ensured comparable cognitive abilities between the two groups. Moreover, children were asked to identify emotional expressions from pictures of peers’ faces (Emotion Recognition Task). Finally, children’s emotional, social and behavioral outcomes were assessed with parent-reported questionnaires. The results revealed that preterm children were less accurate than full-term children in detecting positive emotional expressions and they showed poorer social and behavioral outcomes. Notably, correlational analyses showed a relationship between the ability to recognize emotional expressions and socio-emotional functioning. The present study highlights that early difficulties in decoding emotional signals from faces may be critically linked to emotional and behavioral regulation problems, with important implications for the development of social skills and effective interpersonal interactions.

Happy, sad, or yucky? Parental emotion talk with infants in a book-sharing task

While preschoolers consistently produce and use labels for happy and sad emotional states, labels for other emotional states (e.g., disgust) emerge much later in development. One explanation for these differences may lie in how parents first talk about these emotions with their children in infancy and toddlerhood. The current study examined parent talk about different emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust) in a book-sharing task with their 12- to 24-month-old infants. Parental talk on each emotion page was coded for both quantity and quality of emotion talk. We found that, rather than labeling or asking questions about disgust emotional states, parents instead elaborated on and asked questions about the context of disgust pictures. In contrast, parents frequently labeled happy and sad emotional states and behaviors. Parental use of causal questions related to infants' productive emotion vocabularies. These different narrative styles may partly explain why older children acquire emotion labels for "happy" and "sad" much earlier than "disgust."

The Development of Emotion Reasoning in Infancy and Early Childhood

Historically, research characterizing the development of emotion recognition has focused on identifying specific skills and the age periods, or milestones, at which these abilities emerge. However, advances in emotion research raise questions about whether this conceptualization accurately reflects how children learn about, understand, and respond to others’ emotions in everyday life. In this review, we propose a developmental framework for the emergence of emotion reasoning—that is, how children develop the ability to make reasonably accurate inferences and predictions about the emotion states of other people. We describe how this framework holds promise for building upon extant research. Our review suggests that use of the term emotion recognition can be misleading and imprecise, with the developmental processes of interest better characterized by the term emotion reasoning. We also highlight how the age at which children succeed on many tasks reflects myriad developmental processes. This new framing of emotional development can open new lines of inquiry about how humans learn to navigate their social worlds.

Factors Facilitating Early Emotion Understanding Development: Contributions to Individual Differences

Children's emotion understanding is crucial for healthy social and academic development. The behaviors influenced by emotion understanding in childhood have received much attention, but less focus has been placed on factors that may predict individual differences in emotion understanding, the principle issue addressed in the current review. A more thorough understanding of the developmental underpinnings of this skill may allow for better prediction of emotion understanding, and for interventions to improve emotion understanding early in development. Here, we present theoretical arguments for the substantial roles of three aspects of children's environments in development of emotion understanding: family expressiveness, discussions about emotions, and language development, and we discuss how these are interrelated. Ultimately, this may aid in predicting the effects of environmental influences on development of emotion understanding more broadly, and the mechanisms by which they do so.

Comment: Collective Epistemic Emotions and Individualized Learning: A Relational Account

This comment considers some potential implications of both the appraisal approaches and the framework proposed by Mascolo in regard to a mechanism that is particularly important for development: learning. More specifically, I discuss Mascolo’s account of emotion with respect to how appraisal processes can be considered relational, automatic, social, as well as the drivers of learning amplification.

A Relational Conception of Emotional Development

In this article, I outline a relational-developmental conception of emotion that situates emotional activity within a broader conception of persons as holistic, relational beings. In this model, emotions consist of felt forms of engagement with the world. As felt aspects of ongoing action, uninhibited emotional experiences are not private states that are inaccessible to other people; instead, they are revealed directly through their bodily expressions. As multicomponent processes, emotional experiences exhibit both continuity and dramatic change in development. Building on these ideas, I describe an intersubjective methodology for studying developmental changes in the structure of emotional experience. I illustrate the approach with an analysis of developmental changes in the structure of anger from birth to adulthood.

The Development of Negative Event-Emotion Matching in Infancy: Implications for Theories in Affective Science

Predicting another person's emotional response to a situation is an important component of emotion concept understanding. However, little is known about the developmental origins of this ability. The current studies examine whether 10-month-olds expect facial configurations/vocalizations associated with negative emotions (e.g., anger, disgust) to be displayed after specific eliciting events. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds (N = 60) were familiarized to an Emoter interacting with objects in a positive event (Toy Given) and a negative event (Toy Taken). Infants expected the Emoter to display a facial configuration associated with anger after the negative event, but did not expect the Emoter to display a facial configuration associated with happiness after the positive event. In Experiment 2, 10- and 14-month-olds (N = 120) expected the Emoter to display a facial configuration associated with anger, rather than one associated with disgust, after an "anger-eliciting" event (Toy Taken). However, only the 14-month-olds provided some evidence of linking a facial configuration associated with disgust, rather than one associated with anger, to a "disgust-eliciting event" (New Food). Experiment 3 found that 10-month-olds (N = 60) did not expect an Emoter to display a facial configuration associated with anger after an "anger-eliciting" event involving an Unmet Goal. Together, these experiments suggest that infants start to refine broad concepts of affect into more precise emotion concepts over the first 2 years of life, before learning emotion language. These findings are a first step toward addressing a long-standing theoretical debate in affective science about the nature of early emotion concepts.

Lay Theories About Whether Emotion Helps or Hinders: Assessment and Effects on Emotional Acceptance and Recovery From Distress

This investigation examined how people's beliefs about the functionality of emotion shape their emotional response and regulatory strategies when encountering distressing events. In Study 1, we present data supporting the reliability and validity of an 8-item instrument, the Help and Hinder Theories about Emotion Measure (HHTEM), designed to assess an individual's beliefs about the functionality of emotion. Participants who more strongly endorsed a Help Theory reported greater wellbeing, emotional acceptance, and use of reappraisal to regulate emotion. Participants who more strongly endorsed a Hinder Theory reported less wellbeing and more expressive suppression and substance use. In Study 2, we demonstrate that encouraging participants to view emotion as helpful affected their physiological and regulatory response to a distressing event. Participants in the Help Theory condition showed greater physiological reactivity (SCL) during a distressing film than control participants but were more accepting of their emotional response. Shortly after the film, SCL decreased for participants in the Help Theory condition. Compared to control participants, they engaged in less suppression and reported less lingering effect of the film on their mood. Together, these studies suggest that people's theories about the functionality of emotion influence their reactivity, the strategies they adopt to regulate emotion, and their ability to rebound after distressing events.

Early experiences of insensitive caregiving and children's self-regulation: Vagal tone as a differential susceptibility factor

A considerable body of research has linked parenting to the development of children's self-regulation. However, few studies have considered different domains of self-regulation, the effects of early caregiving behaviors, and whether or not parenting influences children equally. Towards this, the present investigation tested how early maternal insensitivity was associated with difficulties in children's effortful control in early childhood and their regulation of negative emotions during the early school years. Further, we tested whether children's resting vagal tone may operate as a susceptibility factor, consistent with differential susceptibility models. The sample included 220 pairs of mothers and their children who were assessed at 18 months, 3.5 years and 5 years of age. Laboratory visits consisted of observational paradigms and survey assessments. Early maternal insensitivity at 18 months of age forecasted difficulties with effortful control at age 3.5. Moreover, effortful control at age 3.5 was associated with greater anger, but not sadness, regulation at age 5. Consistent with differential susceptibility, children's resting vagal tone at 18 months of age moderated the role of early caregiving on children's effortful control. The findings suggest that low resting vagal tone may operate as a differential susceptibility factor in process models testing associations between early caregiving environments and children's self-regulation.

Social cognition

Social cognition refers to a complex set of mental abilities underlying social stimulus perception, processing, interpretation, and response. Together, these abilities support the development of adequate social competence and adaptation. Social cognition has a protracted development through infancy to adulthood. Given the preponderance of social dysfunctions across neurologic conditions, social cognition is now recognized as a core domain of functioning that warrants clinical attention. This chapter provides an overview of the construct of social cognition, defines some of the most clinically significant sociocognitive abilities (face processing, facial expression processing, joint attention, theory of mind, empathy, and moral processing), and introduces the neural networks and frameworks associated with these abilities. Broad principles for understanding the development of social cognition are presented, and a summary of normative developmental milestones of clinically relevant sociocognitive abilities is proposed. General guidelines for sound social cognition assessment in children and adolescents are summarized.

Mother-Adolescent Conflict Interaction Sequences: The Role of Maternal Internalizing Problems

Adaptive mother-adolescent conflict interactions are characterized by the ability to move from negative to positive emotions. The current micro-observational study investigated how mothers and adolescents make transitions between positive, neutral and negative emotions and whether these transitions depend on maternal internalizing problems. We used three annual waves of conflict interaction observations among 102 mother-adolescent dyads. Mothers were more likely than adolescents to initiate positivity after negativity whereas adolescents were more likely than mothers to reciprocate negativity. Mothers high and low in internalizing problems were equally likely to drive transitions toward positivity. Our study indicates that an active role of mothers in regulating negativity toward positivity is desirable because adolescents are likely to maintain dysfunctional interaction patterns of rigid negativity.

Adult Judges Use Heuristics When Categorizing Infants’ Naturally Occurring Responses to Others’ Emotions

Inferring the motivations of others is a fundamental aspect of social interaction. However, making such inferences about infants can be challenging. This investigation examined adults’ ability to infer the eliciting event of an infant’s behavior and what information adults utilize to make such inferences. In Study 1, adult participants viewed recordings of 24-month-old infants responding to an actor’s emotional display (joy, sadness, fear, anger, or disgust) toward a broken toy and were asked to infer which emotion the actor expressed using only the infant’s behavioral responses. Importantly, videos were blurred and muted to ensure that the only information available regarding the actor’s emotion was the infant’s reaction. Overall, adults were poor judges of the elicitors of infants’ behaviors with accuracy levels below 50%. However, adults’ categorizations appeared systematic, suggesting that they may have used consistently miscategorized emotions. To explore this possibility, a second study was conducted in which a separate sample of adults viewed the original recordings and were asked to identify infants’ goal-directed behaviors (i.e., security seeking, social avoidance, information seeking, prosocial behavior, exploration, relaxed play). Overall, adults perceived a variety of infant differentiated responses to discrete emotions. Furthermore, infants’ goal-directed behaviors were significantly associated with adults’ earlier “miscategorizations.” Infants who responded with specific behaviors were consistently categorized as having responded to specific emotions, such as prosocial behavior in response to sadnesss. Taken together, these results suggest that when explicit emotion information is unavailable, adults may use heuristics of emotional responsiveness to guide their categorizations of emotion elicitors.

Do Preverbal Infants Understand Discrete Facial Expressions of Emotion?

An ongoing debate in affective science concerns whether certain discrete, “basic” emotions have evolutionarily based signals (facial expressions) that are easily, universally, and (perhaps) innately identified. Studies with preverbal infants (younger than 24 months) have the potential to shed light on this debate. This review summarizes what is known about preverbal infants’ understanding of discrete emotional facial expressions. Overall, while many studies suggest that preverbal infants differentiate positive and negative facial expressions, few studies have tested whether infants understand discrete emotions (e.g., anger vs. disgust). Moreover, results vary greatly based on methodological factors. This review also (a) discusses how language may influence the development of emotion understanding, and (b) proposes a new developmental hypothesis for infants’ discrete emotion understanding.

A Relational Framework for Integrating the Study of Empathy in Children and Adults

The development of empathy is central to positive social adjustment. However, issues remain with integrating empathy research conducted with children, adolescents, and adults. The current article (a) provides an overview of how empathy is typically conceptualized and measured in child development and adult research, (b) describes outstanding issues concerning child development and adult research on empathy, and (c) outlines how a relational approach can provide clarity regarding how empathy develops over the course of development. We conclude by offering suggestions for future research on the development of empathy across the lifespan.

A Developmental Perspective on Social-Cognition Difficulties in Youth at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis

After participating in this activity, learners should be better able to:• Evaluate the evolution of social cognitive abilities as a developmental process• Assess the evidence regarding social cognition difficulties in youth at clinical high risk for psychosisIndividuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis exhibit a broad range of difficulties, including impaired social cognition, which may represent a target for early identification and intervention. Several studies have examined various domains of social cognition in CHR individuals. Most focus on adolescent and young adult populations, but given the accumulating evidence that impairment exists before the onset of psychotic disorders, it is critically important to begin to look for these risk markers in younger children. The present article reviews 25 studies on CHR that examine any of the following four domains of social cognition: emotion processing, theory of mind, social perception, or attribution bias. Eligible studies were identified through a comprehensive literature search, conducted using electronic databases, including PubMed/MEDLINE and PsycINFO, and combinations of key social-cognition and CHR search terms. Despite some mixed results, the existing literature establishes that CHR individuals display social-cognitive impairment, though it remains unclear as to how and when that impairment develops. Thus, by using the literature on social cognition in typically developing children as a model and reference, and by looking at the evolution of social-cognitive abilities as a developmental process, our review presents a valuable new perspective that indicates the necessity of further investigation in younger, at-risk populations. Implications for treatment and future research are discussed.

Reconsidering Emotion Dysregulation

This article aims to review the concept of emotion dysregulation, focusing on issues related to its definition, meanings and role in psychiatric disorders. Articles on emotion dysregulation published until May 2016 were identified through electronic database searches. Although there is no agreement about the definition of emotion dysregulation, the following five overlapping, not mutually exclusive dimensions of emotion dysregulation were identified: decreased emotional awareness, inadequate emotional reactivity, intense experience and expression of emotions, emotional rigidity and cognitive reappraisal difficulty. These dimensions characterise a number of psychiatric disorders in various proportions, with borderline personality disorder and eating disorders seemingly more affected than other conditions. The present review contributes to the literature by identifying the key components of emotion dysregulation and by showing how these permeate various forms of psychopathology. It also makes suggestions for improving research endeavours. Better understanding of the various dimensions of emotion dysregulation will have implications for clinical practice. Future research needs to address emotion dysregulation in all its multifaceted complexity so that it becomes clearer what the concept encompasses.

Social Referencing: Defining and Delineating a Basic Process of Emotion

Social referencing informs and regulates one’s relation with the environment as a function of the perceived appraisals of social partners. Increased emphasis on relational and social contexts in the study of emotion makes this interpersonal process particularly relevant to the field. However, theoretical conceptualizations and empirical operationalizations of social referencing are disjointed across domains and populations of study. This article seeks to unite and refine the study of this construct by providing a clear and comprehensive definition of social referencing. Our perspective presents social referencing and social appraisal as coterminous processes and emphasizes the importance of a relational and interpersonal approach to the study of emotion. We conclude by outlining possible lines of research on this construct.

Why (and how) should we study the interplay between emotional arousal, Theory of Mind, and inhibitory control to understand moral cognition?

Findings in the field of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shed new light on our understanding of the psychological and biological bases of morality. Although a lot of attention has been devoted to understanding the processes that underlie complex moral dilemmas, attempts to represent the way in which individuals generate moral judgments when processing basic harmful actions are rare. Here, we will outline a model of morality which proposes that the evaluation of basic harmful actions relies on complex interactions between emotional arousal, Theory of Mind (ToM) capacities, and inhibitory control resources. This model makes clear predictions regarding the cognitive processes underlying the development of and ability to generate moral judgments. We draw on data from developmental and cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology research to evaluate the model and propose several conceptual and methodological improvements that are needed to further advance our understanding of moral cognition and its development.

Vocal tones influence young children's responses to prohibitions

Vocal reactions to child transgressions convey information about the nature of those transgressions. The current research investigated children's ability to make use of such vocal reactions. Study 1 investigated infants' compliance with a vocal prohibition telling them to stay away from a toy. Compared to younger infants, older infants showed greater compliance with prohibitions elicited by moral (interpersonal harm) transgressions but not with prohibitions elicited by pragmatic (inconvenience) transgressions. Study 2 investigated preschoolers' use of firm-stern vocalizations (associated with moral transgressions) and positive vocalizations (associated with pragmatic transgressions). Most children guessed that the firm-stern vocalizations were uttered in response to a moral transgression and the positive vocalizations were uttered in response to a pragmatic transgression. These two studies suggest that children use vocal tones, along with other experiences, to guide their compliance with and interpretation of prohibitions.

Surprise! 20-month-old infants understand the emotional consequences of false beliefs

Recent studies suggest that by the second year of life, infants can attribute false beliefs to agents. However, prior studies have largely focused on infants' ability to predict a mistaken agent's physical actions on objects. The present research investigated whether 20-month-old infants could also reason about belief-based emotional displays. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants viewed an agent who shook two objects: one rattled and the other was silent. Infants expected the agent to express surprise at the silent object if she had a false belief that both objects rattled, but not if she was merely ignorant about the objects' properties. Experiment 3 replicated and extended these findings: if an agent falsely believed that two containers held toy bears (when only one did so), infants expected the agent to express surprise at the empty, but not the full, container. Together, these results provide the first evidence that infants in the second year of life understand the causal relationship between beliefs and emotional displays. These findings thus provide new evidence for false-belief understanding in infancy and suggest that infants, like older children, possess a robust understanding of belief that applies to a broad range of belief-based responses.

Attention to Faces Expressing Negative Emotion at 7 Months Predicts Attachment Security at 14 Months

To investigate potential infant-related antecedents characterizing later attachment security, this study tested whether attention to facial expressions, assessed with an eye-tracking paradigm at 7 months of age (N = 73), predicted infant-mother attachment in the Strange Situation Procedure at 14 months. Attention to fearful faces at 7 months predicted attachment security, with a smaller attentional bias to fearful expressions associated with insecure attachment. Attachment disorganization in particular was linked to an absence of the age-typical attentional bias to fear. These data provide the first evidence linking infants' attentional bias to negative facial expressions with attachment formation and suggest reduced sensitivity to facial expressions of negative emotion as a testable trait that could link attachment disorganization with later behavioral outcomes.

Mothers who are securely attached in pregnancy show more attuned infant mirroring 7 months postpartum

This study contrasted two forms of mother-infant mirroring: the mother's imitation of the infant's facial, gestural, or vocal behavior (i.e., "direct mirroring") and the mother's ostensive verbalization of the infant's internal state, marked as distinct from the infant's own experience (i.e., "intention mirroring"). Fifty mothers completed the Adult Attachment Interview (Dynamic Maturational Model) during the third trimester of pregnancy. Mothers returned with their infants 7 months postpartum and completed a modified still-face procedure. While direct mirroring did not distinguish between secure and insecure/dismissing mothers, secure mothers were observed to engage in intention mirroring more than twice as frequently as did insecure/dismissing mothers. Infants of the two mother groups also demonstrated differences, with infants of secure mothers directing their attention toward their mothers at a higher frequency than did infants of insecure/dismissing mothers. The findings underscore marked and ostensive verbalization as a distinguishing feature of secure mothers' well-attuned, affect-mirroring communication with their infants.

Annual research review: Towards a developmental neuroscience of atypical social cognition

As a starting point for our review we use a developmental timeline, starting from birth and divided into major developmental epochs defined by key milestones of social cognition in typical development. For each epoch, we highlight those developmental disorders that diverge from the normal developmental pattern, what is known about these key milestones in the major disorders affecting social cognition, and any available research on the neural basis of these differences. We relate behavioural observations to four major networks of the social brain, that is, Amygdala, Mentalizing, Emotion and Mirror networks. We focus on those developmental disorders that are characterized primarily by social atypicality, such as autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety and a variety of genetically defined syndromes. The processes and aspects of social cognition we highlight are sketched in a putative network diagram, and include: agent identification, emotion processing and empathy, mental state attribution, self-processing and social hierarchy mapping involving social ‘policing’ and in-group/out-group categorization. Developmental disorders reveal some dissociable deficits in different components of this map of social cognition. This broad review across disorders, ages and aspects of social cognition leads us to some key questions: How can we best distinguish primary from secondary social disorders? Is social cognition especially vulnerable to developmental disorder, or surprisingly robust? Are cascading notions of social development, in which early functions are essential stepping stones or building bricks for later abilities, necessarily correct?

An examination of referential and affect specificity with five emotions in infancy

Referential specificity and affect specificity were examined in 12- to 14-month-olds (n=20), and 16- to 18-month-olds (n=20). Infants were presented with a televised social referencing paradigm involving an actress who emoted a simple descriptive message to one of two objects appearing on the video. The actress altered her affective message using a neutral baseline first, followed by 5 discrete emotions (anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise). Infants were given 30s to interact with the objects after watching the affective episode. Older infants demonstrated referential and affect specificity, as evidenced by their differential treatment of the target and distracter toy in response to messages of anger, fear, surprise, and happiness. In contrast, the younger infants did not show evidence of either referential or affect specificity, as evidenced by the lack of differentiation in their treatment of the target and distracter toy in response to positive and negative emotional messages across all emotional episodes.

Developmental and individual differences in the neural processing of dynamic expressions of pain and anger

We examined the processing of facial expressions of pain and anger in 8-month-old infants and adults by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and frontal EEG alpha asymmetry. The ERP results revealed that while adults showed a late positive potential (LPP) to emotional expressions that was enhanced to pain expressions, reflecting increased evaluation and emotional arousal to pain expressions, infants showed a negative component (Nc) to emotional expressions that was enhanced to angry expressions, reflecting increased allocation of attention to angry faces. Moreover, infants and adults showed opposite patterns in their frontal asymmetry responses to pain and anger, suggesting developmental differences in the motivational processes engendered by these facial expressions. These findings are discussed in the light of associated individual differences in infant temperament and adult dispositional empathy.

Friend or foe? Early social evaluation of human interactions

We report evidence that 29-month-old toddlers and 10-month-old preverbal infants discriminate between two agents: a pro-social agent, who performs a positive (comforting) action on a human patient and a negative (harmful) action on an inanimate object, and an anti-social agent, who does the converse. The evidence shows that they prefer the former to the latter even though the agents perform the same bodily movements. Given that humans can cause physical harm to their conspecifics, we discuss this finding in light of the likely adaptive value of the ability to detect harmful human agents.

Moving ahead in the study of the development of emotion regulation

This special section on the development of emotion regulation highlights several important new directions for research. Specifically, the findings of these studies indicate that: (1) emotion regulation develops across the lifespan and not just in early childhood and does so in complex ways, (2) it is necessary to distinguish among emotions to fully understand emotion regulation, and (3) at all ages emotion regulation is socially regulated. In addition, the limitations of the studies point to additional new directions, including the (4) need for a sophisticated conceptualization of the role of gender, (5) the acute need to incorporate cultural variations into the research, and (6) the need to define emotion regulation as a process.