ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the clinical literature on comparable emotional disorders that emerge in childhood and feature some dysregulation of the emotion. Some psychologists make a distinction between cognition and emotion; it soon became clear that as infants developed, their growing cognitive abilities as well as their social experiences contributed to the emergence of more complex emotions such as sadness and the sociomoral emotions of empathy, shame and guilt. Children’s emotional and behavioural disorders often co-occur. From a developmental perspective, it seems possible that the co-occurrence of different childhood disorders partly derives from a kind of emotional entanglement, in which different negative emotions intertwine with each other and with the more complex sociomoral emotions that follow. The key proposal that emotions develop over infancy is not incompatible with new evidence for the neural basis of emotion.
