Emotional development: a look through different ages

The process of experiencing and understanding emotions is perhaps one of the most influential and interesting aspects of human development.

What are emotions?

Emotions are a combination of

  • the subjective way we react to our environment

  • the physiological arousal (a heightened state of the body).

Our emotional world is an extremely complicated one, attached to life experiences, thoughts, learning mechanisms and body sensations. They can be very difficult to understand and express; even for adults, let alone children!

Emotional development is a learning process, not something we are born with. We learn from our family and surroundings what our emotions mean, how we express them, and more importantly, how to cope with them.

Primary emotions

Primary emotions include joy, surprise, interest, fear, disgust, and sadness; these develop very early in life. They do not require a sense of self, or the ability to self-reflect.

Pleasant primary emotions are shown mainly through smiles and laughter. By 3-8 weeks old, babies start smiling to external stimuli (the voice of their mother), and between 4-12 months old babies further develop laughter.

Unpleasant primary emotions, also start developing as early as a few weeks after birth. At 3 months old, a baby can show caution towards both the familiar and unfamiliar. By 7-9 months old, they begin showing fear; by 4-9 months old, babies show less smiling to unfamiliar people or situations and more distress towards them.

Secondary emotions

Secondary emotions develop later in life, as they are more complex emotions; these include pride, shame, guilt, jealousy, and embarrassment. The reason they appear later in life is because they are emotions centered on the self – they depend on our self-awareness and awareness of other people’s reactions towards us. These typically develop in the second year of life (with the exception of jealousy). Jealousy can occur even in one-year-olds, although it is primarily expressed as anger or fear.

Social referencing

Most of our interactions with others and our surroundings, have emotional elements attached to them. Through these interactions, we learn how to efficiently react in different situations. To achieve a better understanding of this, babies and children use social referencing to decide how it is appropriate to act in different settings. This refers to the process of looking at other people for signs of how it is appropriate to act and to understand a confusing situation better.

Emotional development

A variety of approaches have been proposed to explain emotional development. This can range from cognitive views (babies understand and feel emotions according to how ready their brain is to understand and feel them), to learning perspectives (we learn how to express emotions as a result of reinforcers in our environment – i.e., a warm response to a baby’s smile will likely encourage more frequent smiling), and many more.

Emotional development is one of the most important developmental processes and is affected by a variety of external and internal factors. As adults and primary caregivers in our babies lives, we hold important roles in how their emotional lives will develop. Teenagers who struggle to cope with the sense of failure, grew up as babies who were taught that they will always win and be the best. An adult who is quick to anger among their coworkers, is likely to have resulted from a toddler who wasn’t taught how to sit with their anger and cope with it.

If you are struggling with the behaviour choices and emotional development of your young child, seek help. We are trained to help you and your child!