Search

Modern affective science—the empirical study of emotional responding and affective experience—has been active for a half-century. The Future of Affective Sciencespecial issue considers the history of this field and proposes new directions for the decades ahead. Contributors represent diverse theoretical perspectives, methodological expertise, and domains of study, and the special issue includes both literature reviews and new empirical studies as illustrations. This introductory article synthesizes the contributions, articulating the broader context of the current status of our field and highlighting common themes across articles as well as gaps notable even in this special issue. Sections of the article address theoretical and conceptual issues, research methodology, the questions we ask, and translation of basic affective science to applied domains. We conclude that much has been learned from the first 50 years of affective science, and it is now time for new theories, new research questions, and innovative methods for the decades ahead.

•Affective social competence (ASC) is a key concern for developmental psychologists.•Three main areas of ASC are: (a) emotional experience, (b) communication, (c) understanding.•Advances in research related to these areas are described.•Intervention programs designed to optimize children's ASC are presented.

We studied postinstitutionalized adopted Chinese girls to determine whether those with different variants of the MAOAgene promoter region (MAOA-VNTR) differed in their internalizing and externalizing behavior problems and whether the MAOAgenotype moderated the relation between preadoption adversity and current behavior problems.

Charles Darwin was among the first to recognize the important contribution that infant studies could make to our understanding of human emotional expression. Noting that infants come to exhibit many emotions, he also observed that at first their repertoire of expression is highly restricted. Today, considerable controversy exists regarding the question of whether infants experience and express discrete emotions. According to one position, discrete emotions emerge during infancy along with their prototypic facial expressions. These expressions closely resemble adult emotional expressions and are invariantly concordant with their corresponding emotions. In contrast, we propose that the relation between expression and emotion during infancy is more complex. Some infant emotions and emotional expressions may not be invariantly concordant. Furthermore, infant emotional expressions may be less differentiated than previously proposed. Together with past developmental studies, recent cross-cultural research supports this view and suggests that negative emotional expression in particular is only partly differentiated towards the end of the first year.

One important emotion theory currently postulates an innate tie between specific infant facial expressions and a set of discrete basic emotions. The arguments and evidence relevant to this assertion are reviewed. New data are presented from a naturalistic study of one infant's early expressive development and a judgement study of infant facial, vocal, and body activity. These data challenge the innate tie hypothesis. Based on dynamical systems systems theory, an alternate conceptual framework is presented that may allow us to usefully retain the concept of basic emotions while accommodating the data on infant expressive development.

Eight-year-old children and adult female college students were asked to describe situations in which each of six emotions would be felt (production task) and to judge which emotion would be felt in situations described by other subjects (judgment task). In addition, mothers of the child subjects were asked to judge descriptions generated by their own child and by other children. Data analysis showed that adults and children produced stories that could be classified into the same set of thematic categories. In addition, adults and children could accurately identify the emotion in stories produced by other adults and children. Last, mothers judged descriptions produced by other children as easily as descriptions produced by their own child.

Preschool, kindergarten, first and second-grade children were told twelve stories describing emotion-inducing events. After each story the subjects were presented either with three emotion labels (e.g., “happy,” “sad,” “surprised”) or with facial expressions of three emotions. Subjects were asked to choose the label or expression appropriate for the story's main character. Data analysis showed that children's accuracy increased with age. Performance was high on both response measures but recognition of labels exceeded that of facial expressions. Some of the six emotions studied (e.g., happiness and sadness) were recognized more easily than others (surprise, fear, and anger), with disgust being correctly identified least often.