demanding parent. This may be a more challenging
relationship than one between the same highly irrita-
ble infant and a more positive and flexible parent.
The fit between parent and child may also contribute
to the security of the attachment between infants and
their parents. By working with parents to help them
overcome difficulties in their parenting styles, parents
can discover how to better meet the emotional needs
of their young children.
Self-Conscious Emotions
Around eighteen months of age, toddlers develop
a more sophisticated sense of self that is marked by
self-recognition and the emergence of self-conscious
emotions, such as shame, pride, and embarrassment.
Michael Lewis developed a poignant method to study
this development. A toddler is placed in front of a
mirror and then the parent wipes some rouge on the
child’s nose before moving the child back to the mir-
ror. Although children under eighteen months are
unlikely to show signs of embarrassment at the rouge
on their nose, children between eighteen and twenty-
four months do. Self-recognition makes possible a
more sophisticated understanding of the self and
brings about new levels of emotional development.
Emotional Development during
Childhood
During childhood, children’s emotionality be-
comes more advanced. Their emotionality is focused
less on themselves, and their advanced cognitive skills
allow for more sophisticated responses when emo-
tions are experienced.
Vicarious Emotional Responding
As noted earlier, emotions are viewed as impor-
tant determinants and consequences of interactions
with others. Thus, emotions can be caused by observ-
ing and recognizing what is happening to others. For
example, when five-year-old Rachel became sad when
her infant sister cried because she was sick, Rachel’s
feeling of sadness was the result of the condition of
her sister rather than what was happening directly to
herself. This type of emotional responding is known
as vicarious emotional responding—responses that
occur because of exposure to someone else’s emotion-
al state.
Janet Strayer and Nancy Eisenberg identified dif-
ferent types of vicarious emotional responses. For ex-
ample, empathy is an emotional state that matches
another person’s emotional state—feeling bad be-
cause someone else is feeling bad. In contrast, sympa-
thy refers to feeling sorry or concerned for others
because of their emotional states or conditions. When
Rachel felt sad when her sister cried, she was display-
ing sympathy. Sympathy frequently, but not always,
results from empathy.
Martin Hoffman found that empathy appears
fairly early and increases across childhood. Although
infants cannot distinguish their own feelings from
those of others, they occasionally respond to others’
emotions. For example, infants often cry when they
hear another infant crying. During early childhood,
children tend to act and think in ways that focus on
their own needs and desires. They are likely to re-
spond to another’s emotional distress in ways that
they themselves find comforting. When three-year-
old Ben saw his mother crying, he became sad and
brought her his favorite stuffed animal to cheer her
up. In this situation, Ben projected his own needs
onto his mother.
As children develop the capacity to take the per-
spective of others, they increasingly become aware of
other people’s feelings. Until later childhood, howev-
er, children’s empathic and sympathetic responses
are limited to the feelings of familiar persons in famil-
iar situations. Preschoolers, for example, are likely to
be emotionally responsive to everyday events (such as
getting hurt or being made fun of) that cause distress
to familiar people or animals. During later child-
hood, the scope of children’s concerns generalizes to
conditions of unknown others who are less fortunate
than themselves (such as the poor).
Childhood Anger
Anger is a common emotion at any developmen-
tal period. The causes of anger, however, change
across childhood. For instance, at age five months,
Carlos may become angry because he is hungry, with
the anger occurring out of Carlos’s basic needs not
being met. At five years of age, however, Carlos may
become angry because his sister took away his toy,
with this anger resulting from Carlos’s lack of control
over the situation. Most of young children’s anger oc-
curs as a result of conflicts over materials, resources,
and space. With age, anger is more likely to result
from how one is treated. Thus, the causes of anger be-
come increasingly social.
How children express anger also changes with
age. For instance, when his sister took his toy away
when he was age three, Carlos expressed his anger in
the form of a tantrum. His mother, however, helped
him find better ways to express his feelings, and by
age six Carlos is able to tell his sister he is angry and
request that she give him back his toy. As a result, the
temper tantrums of the ‘‘terrible twos and threes’’ di-
minish as children find better ways to express their
anger and make adjustments.
Language and Emotion
Before the age of two or three, children’s expres-
sion of emotion occurs nonverbally, through facial,134 EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT