ABSTRACT
Emotional development has long fascinated infancy researchers because emotions help shape children’s encounters with the social and inanimate world. Emotional reactions organize infants’ responses to events, and parents pay careful attention to these reactions in order to manage, pacify, accentuate, or redirect them effectively. During the first two years of life, changes in infants’ emotional reactions mark important and meaningful developmental transitions including the first elicited smiles, the earliest indications of stranger wariness, and initial signs of embarrassment. These emotional reactions are also significant because parents view them as indicators of emerging personality-cues to what children’s behavioral styles are like now and what they may be like in future years. Along with variations in activity level, individual differences in predominant mood, soothability, and emotional intensity are characteristics by which infants become behaviorally organized early in life, and by which parents increasingly characterize their children. These individual differences are what we mean by the term temperament. Rothbart (2011) defined temperament partly in terms of individual differences in emotional reactivity, which she viewed as genetically or biologically based stable patterns over time. Thus, studies of emotions and temperament are linked, not only because they involve similar aspects of behavioral individuality, but also because both significantly affect immediate and enduring reactions to other people and experiences.
