ABSTRACT
Social-emotional responding is an essential element of human development necessary for promoting other-oriented behaviors and healthy interpersonal functioning. Social-emotional development refers to children’s increasing awareness and comprehension of their own and others’ emotional experiences, as well as the regulation of their emotions and their ability to employ these skills in ways that are normative for their age and appropriate for the social situation. One model of social-emotional development isolates three core components: other-oriented emotions (e.g., sympathy), which result from the affective understanding of another person’s state; self-conscious emotions (e.g., guilt), which result from an evaluation of the self in relation to others; and self-regulation (e.g., emotion regulation), which involves exerting control over one’s emotions, physiology, or behavior. Deficits in sympathy, guilt, and emotion regulation have all been implicated in children’s tendencies toward aggression. Sympathy, or concern for others, is theorized to inhibit aggressive responding by highlighting the negative consequences experienced by victims of aggression. In contrast, guilt is a negative emotional response to one’s own wrongdoing, and may inhibit aggression in two ways: the anticipation of guilt may prevent the aggressive act altogether or the experience of guilt in response to behaving aggressively may reduce the likelihood of recommitting a similar act. And finally, emotion regulation may allow children to manage their levels of negative affect in order to prevent impulsive aggressive responses and optimize conditions for prosocial responses. With this in mind, understanding the healthy development of these three components of social-emotional responding is crucial to inhibiting aggression in children and adolescents.
