Research Paradigms on Emotion

When trying to mark out the boundaries of phenomena covered by emotional development, we have to answer the question raised by Mascolo and Griffin (1998b) in the title of their book: What develops in emotional development? Despite all the differences in the existing theoretical approaches, there seems to be a general consensus that emotions possess two aspects: a form and a function. The form aspect focuses on which indicators can be used to identify an emotion. The function aspect focuses on which (adaptive) functions emotions serve for human activity in interaction with other functions such as perception, memory, or motivation. Furthermore, there should also be a general consensus that human development from birth onward is characterized by an interplay between nature and nurture, and is always embedded within a context that, unlike the natural context of animals, is a product of culture. Hence, we can define the following five dimensions of emotional development.