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This study examined relationships among parents' physiological regulation, their emotion socialization behaviors, and their children's emotion knowledge. Parents' resting cardiac vagal tone was measured, and parents provided information regarding their socialization behaviors and family emotional expressiveness. Their 4- or 5-year-old children (N=42) participated in a laboratory session in which their knowledge of emotional facial expressions and situations was tested and their own resting vagal tone was monitored. Results showed that parents' vagal tone was related to their socialization behaviors, and several parent socialization variables were related to their children's emotion knowledge. These findings suggest that parents' physiological regulation may affect the emotional development of their children by influencing their parenting behaviors.

This paper presents a unitary approach to emotion and emotion regulation, building on the excellent points in the lead article by Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue), as well as the fine commentaries that follow it. It begins by stressing how, in the real world, the processes underlying emotion and emotion regulation appear to be largely one and the same, rendering the value of the distinction largely for the benefit of analysis. There is an extensive discussion of how the same processes can generate emotions (i.e., are constitutive of emotion) and account for variability of manifestation of emotion in context (i.e., regulate them). Following an extensive review of many of the principles involved in emotion and emotion regulation, the paper presents implications for developmental study of infants and children, includes several methodological recommendations, and concludes with an analysis of the extent to which contemporary affective neuroscience contributes to the study of emotion and emotion regulation.

Cross cultural studies of infant emotional responses can shed light on the origins a group differences in adult emotional behavior as well as the processes involved in emotional development both within and across cultures in the U.S., a number of laboratory procedures have been developed that are thought to evoke emotions. In the present study, observer judgments of infant emotional responses were collected as an initial step in a larger investigation of American, Japanese, and Chinese infants' facial expressions of emotion. These data will enable to address several questions regarding the universality and ontogeny of infant facial expression. For example, we can determine whether American, Japanese, and Chinese infants produce different variants of prototypical emotional facial expressions identified for adults.

Eye gaze direction and expression intensity effects on emotion recognition in children with autism disorder and typically developing children were investigated. Children with autism disorder and typically developing children identified happy and angry expressions equally well. Children with autism disorder, however, were less accurate in identifying fear expressions across intensities and eye gaze directions. Children with autism disorder rated expressions with direct eyes, and 50% expressions, as more intense than typically developing children. A trend was also found for sad expressions, as children with autism disorder were less accurate in recognizing sadness at 100% intensity with direct eyes than typically developing children. Although the present research showed that children with autism disorder are sensitive to eye gaze direction, impairments in the recognition of fear, and possibly sadness, exist. Furthermore, children with autism disorder and typically developing children perceive the intensity of emotional expressions differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]