ABSTRACT
Our understanding of the developing relationship between emotion and cognition is still primitive. Although there undoubtedly are many reasons for this, two are especially relevant to the argument presented in this chapter. First, with only a few exceptions (Emde, Gaensbauer, & Harmon, 1976; Izard, 1978, 1979, 1980; Kagan, 1978; Lewis & Brooks, 1978; Sroufe, 1979; Thomas & Chess, 1980; Weiner, Kun, & Benesh-Weiner, 1980), theorists of emotion have been notorious for ignoring issues of development; and developmentalists have been equally notorious for avoiding something as raw and unrefined as emotion. Many developmentalists encountering the word affect still mentally transform it into socialization and assume that studying parent-child interaction is somehow equivalent to studying the development of affect. Those who are a bit more modern perhaps think of affect as social cognition. Others equate affect with self or a personality subsystem like the id and still others with motivation—but only a courageous few have taken human emotionality as the core meaning of the term affect and focused on human emotionality in its development.
