Emotional development

When interacting with their caregivers, children have important experiences that influence their development in important ways. For children’s social-emotional development, a key development is the emergence of emotional awareness – as development progresses, children become aware of their inner experience and can increasingly better understand these states. Later in development, building on emotional awareness, the focus is on regulating one’s own feelings (i.e., emotion regulation), which becomes a central aspect of social-emotional competence in middle childhood. For both emotional awareness and emotion regulation, caregivers play an important role, as they frame children’s experience and behavior in a certain way based on their beliefs. In our studies, we use different approaches (e.g., cross-cultural comparative studies or intervention studies) to investigate how social interactions affect children’s social-emotional development.

  • Selected publications

    Holodynski, M. & Kärtner, J. (2023). Parental co-regulation of child emotions. In I. Roskam, J. Gross, & M. Mikolajczak (Eds.) Emotion Regulation and Parenting, (pp. 129–148). Cambridge Series.

    Kärtner, J., Schwick, M., Wefers, H., & Nomikou, I. (2022). Interactional preludes to infants’ affective climax. Infant Behavior and Development, 67, 101715. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101715

    Wefers, H., Schwarz, C. L., Hernández Chacón, L., & Kärtner, J. (2022). Maternal ethnotheories about infants’ ideal states in two cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 53(6), 603–625. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221221096785

    Silkenbeumer, J. R., Schiller, E.-M., & Kärtner, J. (2018). Co- and self-regulation of emotions in the preschool setting. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 44, 72–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.02.014

    Silkenbeumer, J. R., Schiller, E.-M., Holodynski, M., & Kärtner, J. (2016). The role of co-regulation for the development of social-emotional competence. Journal of Self-Regulation and Regulation, 2, 11–26. https://doi.org/10.11588/josar.2016.2.34351

    Kärtner, J., Holodynski, M., & Wörmann, V. (2013). Parental ethnotheories, social practice and the culture-specific development of the social smiling in infants. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 20(1), 79–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2012.742112