Cognitive Connie
Vad är socioemotionell utveckling?
Socioemotionell utveckling omfattar två djupt sammanflätade domäner: tillväxten av barns emotionella liv — hur de upplever, uttrycker och reglerar emotioner — och tillväxten av deras sociala värld — hur de formar relationer, förstår andra sinnen och utvecklar en känsla av vilka de är.
Nyckelpersoner
Alexander Thomas & Stella Chess
Thomas: 1914–2003; Chess: 1914–2007Psychiatrists who launched the New York Longitudinal Study in 1956, providing the first systematic longitudinal data on temperament from infancy to adulthood. They identified nine temperamental dimensions, three broad profiles (easy, difficult, slow-to-warm-up), and introduced the concept of goodness of fit — the idea that developmental outcomes depend on the interaction between child temperament and environmental demands. Their work established temperament as a legitimate and measurable dimension of individual variation from early infancy.
Jerome Kagan
1929–2021Harvard developmental psychologist whose prospective longitudinal studies identified behavioural inhibition in toddlerhood as a stable, biologically grounded temperamental trait with longitudinal links to anxiety. His research traced physiological correlates of inhibition (amygdala reactivity, cortisol, heart rate) and argued that temperament sets probabilistic constraints on development that are modifiable by experience but not erased by it. Author of The Nature of the Child, Unstable Ideas, and many influential texts.
Michael Lewis
1937–Rutgers developmental psychologist known for pioneering research on self-conscious emotions, self-representation in infancy, and the development of shame and guilt. His distinction between shame (global self-condemnation) and guilt (behaviour-focused) — and his demonstration that self-conscious emotions require self-awareness — reshaped the psychology of emotional development and its clinical applications.
Susan Harter
1939–University of Denver developmental psychologist who constructed the most comprehensive developmental model of self-concept and self-esteem across the lifespan. Her multidimensional model distinguishes global self-worth from domain-specific competence beliefs and traces their developmental trajectories from early childhood through adulthood. Her Self-Perception Profile for Children and related instruments are widely used in research and clinical assessment.
Nancy Eisenberg
1950–Arizona State University developmental psychologist whose programme of longitudinal research produced the most comprehensive account of children's empathy, prosocial behaviour, and emotional regulation. Her work established the regulatory-empathy interaction: children who combine high empathic concern with adequate regulatory capacities show the most prosocial behaviour; those high in empathy but poor in regulation tend toward personal distress. Her research spans over four decades and multiple cohorts.
Nyckelbegrepp
Temperament
Biologically rooted individual differences in emotional reactivity and self-regulation that are observable from early infancy. Thomas and Chess (1977) identified nine temperamental dimensions (activity level, rhythmicity, approach/withdrawal, adaptability, intensity, mood, distractibility, threshold, and persistence) and described three broad profiles: easy (~40%), slow-to-warm-up (~15%), and difficult (~10%). Kagan added the important concept of behavioural inhibition — a stable temperamental trait characterised by intense wariness in novel social situations, with biological correlates (amygdala reactivity, cortisol, heart rate) and longitudinal links to anxiety disorders.
Goodness of fit
Thomas and Chess's concept that developmental outcomes depend not on temperament alone, but on the match between a child's temperamental characteristics and the demands and expectations of the environment — particularly parenting style. A child with a difficult temperament raised by patient, responsive parents may develop well; the same temperament in an impatient, punitive environment predicts poorer outcomes. This concept shifted attention from temperament as a fixed destiny to the interaction between child characteristics and caregiving context.
Social referencing
The infant's use of a caregiver's emotional expression to regulate their own response to an ambiguous or uncertain situation. Emerges at around 8–9 months, coinciding with joint attention. Classic demonstration: Sorce et al. (1985) showed that infants looking across the visual cliff would cross the deep side if their mother posed a happy expression (74% crossed) but not if she posed fear (0% crossed). Social referencing is an early form of emotional communication that shapes fear learning, exploration, and the infant's understanding of which situations are safe.
Emotional regulation
The processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them (Gross, 1998). In infancy, regulation is initially external — co-regulated by caregivers through contact, vocal soothing, and contingent responding. As the prefrontal cortex matures, children progressively develop internal regulatory strategies: distraction, reappraisal, suppression. The quality of early co-regulation in the attachment relationship scaffolds the development of internal regulatory capacity. Poor regulatory development is a transdiagnostic risk factor across multiple forms of psychopathology.
Theory of Mind (ToM)
The capacity to attribute mental states — beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, knowledge — to oneself and others, and to use these attributions to understand and predict behaviour. Typically assessed using the false-belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Baron-Cohen et al., 1985): children must predict where a character will search for an object given that the character holds a false belief about its location. Children typically pass at around 4 years. Autistic children often show delays on ToM tasks (Baron-Cohen's "mindblindness" hypothesis), though this account has been substantially nuanced by more recent research.
Empathy and prosocial development
Empathy involves both affective (feeling with another) and cognitive (perspective-taking) components. Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow (1992) demonstrated empathic concern and rudimentary prosocial responses — sharing, comforting — in infants as young as 14–18 months. Eisenberg's longitudinal research established that empathic concern combined with adequate emotional regulation predicts prosocial behaviour and positive social adjustment into adulthood. Children who are highly empathic but poorly regulated tend to become personally distressed rather than acting prosocially.
Self-concept development
Susan Harter's developmental model traces a shift from global, undifferentiated, and unrealistically positive self-perceptions in early childhood toward multidimensional, more accurate, and domain-specific self-evaluations in middle childhood and adolescence. Young children describe themselves in concrete, physical terms and show inflated self-perceptions because they cannot integrate contradictory self-relevant information. By 8–12 years, children use psychological trait terms, make social comparisons, and hold differentiated competence beliefs across specific domains (academic, athletic, social, physical appearance, behavioural).
Self-conscious emotions
Michael Lewis's term for emotions that require self-awareness and social comparison: shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride. Unlike primary emotions (fear, joy, anger), self-conscious emotions require a representation of the self, knowledge of social standards, and an evaluation of the self against those standards. They emerge in the second year of life as self-representation develops. The shame–guilt distinction is clinically important: shame (global negative self-evaluation) is associated with psychopathology and aggression; guilt (focused on a specific behaviour) is associated with empathy and reparative action.
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Senast granskad augusti 2025- 1.
Thomas, A., & Chess, S. (1977). Temperament and Development. Brunner/Mazel.
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Foundational report from the New York Longitudinal Study establishing temperament typologies and the goodness-of-fit model.
- 2.
Kagan, J., & Snidman, N. (2004). The Long Shadow of Temperament. Harvard University Press.
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Longitudinal follow-up of behaviourally inhibited infants into adolescence, establishing biological correlates and links to anxiety disorders.
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Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., & Spinrad, T. L. (2006). Prosocial development. In W. Damon & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology (6th ed., Vol. 3). Wiley.
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Comprehensive review of the developmental literature on empathy, prosocial behaviour, and emotional regulation, summarising Eisenberg's longitudinal programme and the broader field.
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Harter, S. (1999). The Construction of the Self: A Developmental Perspective. Guilford Press.
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Definitive account of self-concept development from childhood through adolescence, including the multidimensional model of self-perception and the Self-Perception Profile instruments.
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Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 21(1), 195–200.
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Classic experimental demonstration of social referencing using the visual cliff, showing that infants regulate locomotion based on caregiver facial expressions.