Emotional Development In Early Childhood: A Social Relationship Perspective
Authors: Dunn Judy 
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, children’s affective development in childhood is considered within the framework of their close relationships. The striking developments in children’s emotional expression and experience and in their understanding of emotions during early childhood take place in the context of these relationships and profoundly affect the nature of such relationships. In turn, children’s experiences within their close relationships are related to both normative and individual differences in affective development. Three core themes in current developmental research are particularly important for our understanding of affective development and its links with children’s social relationships. First, there has been major growth over the past decade in research on children’s understanding of emotions—clearly of key significance for the nature of relationships. Second, a key theme in research on affective development in infancy and early childhood has been the significance of reciprocal emotional communication between child and caregiver and the growth of “intersubjectivity” (Braten, 1998). These developments are seen as setting the stage for relationship development in the childhood years that follow. Third, the work on links between affective development and social relationships has provided an exciting opportunity to bridge the gap between cognitive and social approaches to understanding children’s development and to address major questions in psychology concerning links between affect and cognition (Dunn, 1996). In infancy and childhood, changes in what causes babies’ distress, comfort, amusement, and interest are intimately linked to the changes in their relationships with others. In parallel, parents’ and siblings’ emotional behavior with young children are intricately connected with the babies’ increasingly differentiated response to their partners’ affective communication. In terms of theoretical approaches, there has been growing interest in functional accounts of the significance of emotional development (Campos, Mumme, Kermoian, & Campos, 1994), in the development of ideas on affective communication, and in how such emotional communication sets a framework for the development of “shared meaning.” Emotion, as Stern (1985) put it, is the primary medium and the primary subject of communication in infancy. The emotional communication between child and partner in the first two years is thought by many scholars to set up a framework for the growth of joint attention and shared reference, for the development of intentional action and the understanding of agency, and thus for the growth of language and the development of a sense of self (see, e.g., Hobson, 1993; Thompson, 1998). In terms of empirical research, advances have been made in documenting babies’ and young children’s sensitivity to their mothers’ and fathers’ emotional expressions, in the detailed analysis of how affective messages are carried by the voice and face and how they change with children’s development, and in toddlers’ and preschoolers’ rapidly growing understanding of emotion and its role in relation to human action.