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rom social reference to empathy: How do babies learn to "read" other people's emotions
Social-emotional development is an important area of child development and is a gradually integrated process in which children gain the ability to understand, experience, express, and manage emotions and develop meaningful relationships with others. This process encompasses a range of skills and constructs including, but not limited to, self-awareness, joint attention, play, theory of mind (understanding others’ perspectives), self-esteem, emotion regulation, friendship, and identity development. Therefore, social-emotional development lays the foundation for children to engage in other developmental tasks. For example, a child struggling with a difficult school assignment may need to manage his or her own frustration and seek help from a peer. After an argument, teens may need to be able to clearly express their feelings and understand their partner's perspective in order to successfully resolve the conflict.
Many mental health disorders, including major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, borderline personality disorder, substance use disorders, and eating disorders, can be understood through the lens of social-emotional development, particularly the ability to regulate emotions.
Early Childhood (Birth to 3 years)
Attachment
The strong emotional connections that humans form with important others in their lives are called attachment. Although most adult attachments are with a spouse, primary caregivers during infancy provide the first and most influential emotional attachments in humans. John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth first formulated and tested the theory of attachment, a process that is thought to be evolutionarily beneficial for survival. According to their research, there are four stages in attachment formation.
Initial stage (0–3 months): Babies give off instinctive signals, such as crying and looking, that help facilitate interaction between caregiver and baby.
Securely attached children: These children will explore toys independently when their caregiver is present and may cry when they are separated, but they will seek comfort and calm down quickly when the caregiver returns.
Emotional Experience
From birth, infants have the ability to signal general distress, respond to unpleasant stimuli and physical states, and may smile with pleasure when they are content. Infants begin to use social smiles—smiles in response to positive social interactions—at 2 to 3 months of age, and as they age, expressions of happiness become more intentional.
Understanding Others
Around 8 to 10 months, infants begin to engage in social referencing, where they observe their parents' reactions to inform their own behavior. In the classic visual cliff experiment, separated infants rely on their mothers’ expressions to test for danger.
When mothers showed encouraging and happy expressions, most babies chose to cross the so-called dangerous cliff, but when they showed fear or anger, most babies chose not to cross.
Preschool (3–6 years old)
Self-concept
Self-concept refers to the set of attributes, abilities, attitudes, and values that an individual believes define him or herself. As children grow older, they become better able to describe their likes and dislikes and develop a clearer sense of self-identity and gender identity.
Understanding Others
During the preschool years, children begin to develop a basic theory of mind, which is the ability to understand and consider things from other people's perspectives. This belief gradually grows between the ages of 4 and 6.
Middle Childhood (7–12 years)
Emotional Experience
As children grow older, their emotional vocabulary becomes richer. Generally, during middle childhood, children gradually learn to use more complex emotional words to describe their emotions.
The school-age children's emotion vocabulary doubled every two years during this period, and by the age of 11, most children understood nearly 300 emotion words, a number that showed a significant improvement in their ability to recognize emotions.
From attachment to expression of emotional experience, and then to understanding the feelings of others, the social and emotional development of infants is a complementary and gradually deepening process. Through these exchanges and interactions, children not only learn how to identify and understand other people's emotions, but also gradually master the ability of empathy. As they develop, these abilities will have long-term implications for their overall social skills and emotional regulation, so how does this foundation in emotional understanding shape their relationships later in life?
