The September 2019 special issue of Developmental Psychology presents articles that challenge existing concepts and motivate new directions in the research on human emotional development.
Guest editors Seth Pollak, Linda Camras, and Pamela Cole discuss the issue's significance and practical implications.
Note: To further stimulate the scholarly exchange of ideas around this topic, Developmental Psychology invites readers to submit commentaries or reactions on any article or set of articles in the special issue. Commentaries should be written in the spirit of friendly exchange of ideas that help spur the next generation research and will be published together in a forthcoming issue of the journal. Submissions are due October 15, 2019. If interested, send an email to the Editor's Office or Seth Pollak.
What is the special issue about?
This special issue of Developmental Psychology highlights new directions in the study of human emotional development, setting an agenda for a next generation of research questions for the field. Together, the papers address novel theory, approaches, methodology, and new empirical evidence.
Major innovative topics ask these questions:
- What is the nature of human emotion?
- How do emotional behaviors emerge through children's interactions with their cultures and environment?
- How do humans come to understand and use emotion signals and categories?
- What are the neural mechanisms underlying how we learn about and learn to regulate emotions, and are they specific to emotion?
- Do interpretations of classic studies in the field and commonly used measurement methods hold up to more contemporary views of emotion?
This special issue motivates new directions to tackle these and other basic questions in the study of emotional development for the 21st century.
What is the significance of the issue?
Research on infants' and children's emotions blossomed between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. This surge established that a full understanding of human development requires more than understanding physical growth, achievements in thinking, and becoming a social person; it also requires understanding how we feel, how we understand and communicate our feelings and those of others, and how emotion penetrates so many aspects of human development.
Why? Emotions are the way we evaluate the significance of circumstances for our goals and prepare to act to maintain or regain them.
While the study of emotional development has increasingly captured the attention of many researchers, our understanding of emotional development is still undergoing change.
Despite so much interest and excitement, our knowledge of various aspects of emotion hit some key barriers:
- We discovered there was no agreement on what emotion is
- We realized that we may have ideas and use terms that we seem to readily understand but may lack evidence or be based on incorrect assumptions
- We became aware that emotions are not facial expressions or heart rate patterns; what we see in an expression or feel in a moment is but a glimpse of a complex, underlying dynamic process
New questions are being raised regarding what constitutes emotion; new frameworks for understanding the neurobiological systems underlying emotion across species are recasting what needs to be understood about the emergence of biological mechanisms underlying emotion, and new approaches to understanding learning are being applied to emotion.
And, increasingly, those who raise and work with children seek evidence that contributes to raising healthy children and helping children confronted with adversities and struggling in life.
We realized there is a world of interesting questions that remain to be asked, and that it was time to inspire a new generation of research.
These challenges call for a new wave of thinking and research on emotional development — time for a special issue!
Tell us about a few key takeaways.
When Eric Dubow, editor of Developmental Psychology, approached us about organizing this special issue, he told us that he felt it had been some time since the topic had been brought to the attention of a wider audience. In addition, we felt the field was ripe for some challenging new ideas.
Indeed, the call for this special issue drew a response that far exceeded what we expected (and set a record for the journal), suggesting that interest and activity in the field is very high. We selected papers that highlight novel perspectives; gave an opportunity to authors whose primary expertise was not in emotional development, emotion, or developmental psychology as long as they offered fresh perspectives that could generate new research ideas in emotional development; and sought contributions from scholars representing a range of different disciplinary, cultural, global, and theoretical viewpoints.
In considering the past and future of research on emotional development, we identified three areas in which novel advances have the potential to be made:
- New ways to conceptualize emotion and emotional development
- New ways to understand how and why emotions change over development
- New methods for exploring emotion and emotional development
There are so many opportunities for young researchers to pursue any number of interesting and important questions regarding emotional development. We want to inspire young scholars to generate and explore new ideas and new research directions by providing examples in this issue.
Special Issue
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