Emotional development can be divided into three areas: recognising emotions, understanding emotions and regulating emotions.

Darwin argued that the ability to communicate emotions is innate. Evidence for this comes from cross-cultural understanding of emotions and new-borns that portray certain emotions. There is a distinction between basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, interest, surprise and disgust) and complex emotions (pride, shyness, jealousy, guilt, shame, embarrassment). Adults are skilful in reading infants’ expressions and infants show the basic emotions from birth. Infants are able to discriminate between different emotions, although this does not mean that they understand the emotions. Evidence suggests that infants do have an emotional understanding, but this does not necessarily mean that they know that expressions are linked to emotional feeling.

Social referencing occurs when infants and young children look to their caregiver for advice when faced with a difficult or uncertain situation and seek social cues to guide their actions. This is shown in the visual cliff paradigm. Children begin to use emotion words from 18 months with a rapid increase in emotional vocabulary from the third year. Young children showed, using language, that they understand the causal relation between behaviour and emotional response.

Children scored above change on an emotion understanding task, although there was a lot of variation between the tasks. The better children performed on this task, the more pro-social behaviour they showed. Happy emotional responses during play is also associated with better understanding on the emotion understanding task. More negative emotional response during play is associated with poorer understanding on the emotional understanding task.

False belief is incorrectly believing something to be the case when it is not. This has an influence on emotional development, because it is possible that children then belief that others have the same beliefs as them, including emotions. Children that can pass the false belief test are not able to use this capacity to predict the likely emotional response, but they are able to by age 6. There are three main developmental phases of emotion understanding:

1. Up to age 5
   Able to understand public aspects of emotion.
2. Around age 7
   Emotions are related to other mental states such as knowledge and beliefs, but the emotion one expresses might not be the emotion one feels.
3. Between 9 and 11 years
   Realisation that two emotions can be felt for the same event.

Emotion understanding might facilitate children’s acquisition of theory of mind abilities. The quality of family interaction is also important for emotional understanding. Caregivers’ behaviour early in the child’s life is a predictor for children’s later emotion understanding. Mind-mindedness refers to caregivers who are able to ‘read’ their infant’s signals appropriately. Maternal mind-mindedness is a good predictor of attachment security. Callous-unemotional traits include general poverty of affect, a lack of remorse and a disregard for accepted values.

Emotion regulation refers to adjusting one’s emotional state to a suitable level of intensity. This prevents emotional overload and allows one to function in a consistent manner. Children are less able to hide their pleasant feelings compared to their unpleasant feelings and this could be because of the social undesirability of unpleasant emotions.

The former view of attachment was that it was a secondary drive or by-product of the infant associating the mother with providing for physiological needs. Bowlby argued that attachment was an innate primary drive in the infant. The main function of the attachment system is to enable the infant to maintain proximity to the caregiver. Infants will not miss the caregiver, because they lack object permanence, until the age of 8 months, according to Bowlby.

Bowlby proposed that attachment developed in phases:

1. Pre-attachment phase (0-2 months)
   There is little differentiation in their social responses to familiar and unfamiliar people.
2. Foundations of attachment (2-7 months)
   Infants are beginning to recognize their caregivers, although they do not yet show attachment behaviour upon separation.
3. Clear-cut attachment (after 7 months)
   Attachment behaviour is shown upon separation.
4. Goal-corrected partnership (after 2 years)
   The child understands that separation is sometimes necessary and relies on representations to guide their future social interaction.

A child who experiences any degree of continuity of care will become attached to the person who provides that care. According to Ainsworth, there are different attachment types, which can be tested by the strange situation test:

1. Secure attachments
   Infants explore the room in the presence of their caregiver and might become distressed when the caregiver leaves, seeking comfort of the caregiver when that person returns.
2. Insecure-avoidant attachment
   Infants who appear indifferent toward their caregiver and treat the stranger and caregiver in very similar ways.
3. Insecure-resistant attachment
   Infants who are over-involved with the caregiver, showing attachment behaviour even during the pre-separation episodes, with little exploration or interest in the environment. These infants are extremely distressed when the caregiver leaves.
4. Insecure-disorganised attachment
   Infants who are disoriented during the strange situation procedure and show no clear strategy for coping with separation from and reunion with their caregivers. This attachment is often associated with maltreatment.

Individual differences in the caregiver’s sensitivity to the infant’s cues were the earliest reported predictors of attachment security. Insecure-avoidant attachments are associated with caregivers that neglected care on several occasions and insecure-resistant attachments are associated with caregivers that were very inconsistent with giving care. The ability to read the infant’s needs is also associated with the type of attachment.

Individuals’ representations of their early childhood experiences with attachment figures are assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview. There are four types of attachments for adults:

1. Autonomous attachment
   Adults who give a coherent, well-balanced account of their attachment experiences, showing a clear valuing of close personal relationships.
2. Dismissing attachments
   Adults who deny the importance of attachment experiences and insist they cannot recall childhood events and emotions or provide idealised representations of their attachment relationships.
3. Preoccupied attachment
   Adults who are unable to move on from their childhood experiences.
4. Unresolved attachment
   Adults who have not been able to resolve feelings relating to the death of a loved one or to trauma that they may have suffered.

Infant’s attachment remains  stable in only around half of the infants in a six-month period.