provide a basis for conflict free interchanges. For example, the adoption of
standards for one’s behavior, reflected in such emotions as shame and guilt,
assumes the presence of an other, such as a parent, who expresses approval or
disapproval, pleasure or displeasure, with the behavior and emotions of the
self. Feeling such emotions, then involves the ability to take on the perspec-
tive of an other with an inner world of reflections and mental states some-
what independent of the self. At somewhat more advanced levels, that other
becomes even more abstract. For example, the other of the adolescent is no
longer the parent, but a larger social group whose shared system of values be-
comes the reference norm for one’s own behavior. This third person perspec-
tive involves the ability to guide one’s behavior by the standards of an ab-
stract other such as a rule applicable to all, or a system of conventions that
regulates the behavior of all possible members of the group.
Yet a third dimension implies increasing affective differentiation, or the
degree to which the individual is able to differentiate and organize different,
and often opposite emotions. At a low level, it involves global and polarized,
static emotions. With advancing development, however, emotions are differ-
entiated in terms of fine shadings and gradations as well as extensions across
time and context. A particularly important aspect of such emotion differenti-
ation is the ability to coordinate positive and negative affect is self and others.
As the work of Fischer (e.g., Fischer & Ayoub, 1994) and Harter (1999) dis-
covered, children’s ability to coordinate positive and negative feelings in self
and other demonstrates, is not mastered until adolescence.
By far the most active research on these three aspects of increasing cogni-
tive-affective integration has been on the period from childhood to adoles-
cence, but research on adults indicates that important developments continue
well into adulthood (Labouvie-Vief, Chiodo, Goguen, Diehl, & Orwoll,
1995; Labouvie-Vief, Diehl, Chiodo, & Coyle, 1995). For example, the ability
of adolescents to effectively regulate their emotions is limited by a tendency
toward dualistic thinking in which a world of rational reflection is juxtaposed
to a domain of emotions. Similarly, youth often assume that the third person
perspective has universal status rather than being an empirical generalization
or abstraction dependent, in many ways, on one’s own personal experience
with its particular cultural and historical situatedness. In a related fashion, in
the domain of affective differentiation, they can confer polarized affective
meanings to abstract systems such as ideologies. The resulting dualisms be-
tween mind and body, self and other, and good and bad are increasingly inte-
grated as adults move beyond young adulthood and into midlife. Thus indi-
viduals attempt to search for a new notion of standards by relativizing their
own autobiography and emotions in a system that takes on more pan-
cultural and pan-historical dimensions. This evolving interpersonal perspec-
tive allows individuals to assume a shared and normative reality which
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