Progress in Understanding the Emergence of Human Emotion

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.