ABSTRACT
Kind emotions connect children to others in need and highlight the negative consequences of aggression. To begin this chapter, we selectively review the strong base of foundational studies linking the prototypical kind emotions of sympathy and ethical guilt to aggression across development. To further account for the complex nature of children’s day-to-day emotional and social experiences, we then discuss more recent work documenting the multifaceted relations of these constructs, including how kind emotions buffer against the deleterious effects of socioemotional challenges (e.g., poor emotion regulation). To finish, we suggest promising new directions that account for diversity and embrace technological innovations—challenges and opportunities that will factor heavily into the next generation of developmental research on kind emotions and aggression. Specifically, we discuss associations of kind emotions and aggression across economic, class, racial/ethnic, identity-based, and clinical divides, and the promise of embracing and leveraging technological innovations, such as smartphone-based ecological assessments and virtual reality.
