ABSTRACT
What is an emotion? How does emotion relate to cognition? How do we control our emotions? These questions have been debated vigorously at least since Socrates, and they have been central to psychology for over a century, but recent work in developmental social cognitive neuroscience provides a new framework for addressing them. In this chapter, we explore the development of emotion and its regulation in the context of our recent iterative reprocessing model (Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007; Zelazo & Cunningham, 2007). According to this model, emotion corresponds to an aspect of cognition—its evaluative, motivational aspect. This aspect of human information processing manifests itself in multiple dimensions—subjective experience, observable behavior, and physiological activity, among them. Although it is possible to have cognition that is more or less emotional, and more or less motivated, all cognition is motivated to some degree, and all emotional experience has a cognitive dimension. From this perspective, emotional experience is modulated in important ways by processes that have been studied under the rubric of “executive function,” and research on the development of executive function has clear implications for the development of affective processing.
