Development: Socio-Emotional

Emotional life, which develops earlier than rational life, is the key to understanding the world in early childhood. However, up to now, less research has been carried out on this important aspect than on others, such as intellectual, linguistic, motor or moral aspects, and this has had a corresponding effect on assessment.

The mechanism of emotional development still remains obscure. Thus, there are very few scales for assessing emotional development, compared to the number of instruments for assessing, for example, cognitive or motor development. Of the emotional assessment scales that do exist, the most notable are those of: Erikson (1963), who described the psychosocial development of children, and whose theory involves a polar evolution of emotions with five different stages: Trust-Mistrust (0–18 months), Autonomy-Shame (18 months-3 years), Inactive-Guilt (3–5 years), Industry-Inferiority (6–11 months) and Identity-Confusion (12–17 months); Jersild, who proposed five psycho-affective stages based on different fear elicitors, the most important of which were: strange, being different, ridicule, separation and imagination; and Sroufe (1979), who identified the following stages: smile (1–3 months), positive affect (3–6 months), active participation (7–9 months), attachment (9–12 months), practising (12–18 months) and self-concept (18–36 months).

Experts in this field are concerned with clarifying certain issues such as the age at which children show emotions and how we can notice them, the age at which they detect other people's emotions, or when they begin to recognize their own emotions. Serious assessment is necessary if we are to answer such questions (Campus & Barret, 1984).

There are three main strategies for measuring infants' emotions: laboratory procedures, parental reports and observation in natural contexts. When children grow up – and depending on their age at the time of assessment – it is possible to add other methods, including pictorial tests, questionnaires to be answered by the child, matching pictures, drawing and playing.

While assessing emotions in children, it is often necessary to focus on some of their components, such as elicitors, receptors, states, expressions or experiences (Lewis, 1998). Therefore, the psychological assessment of emotions should take into account physiological factors, facial expressions and body postures, as well as vocalizations and language.

We can also analyse the physical basis of emotion by means of skin conductance, cortisone rates, electromyography, and so on. These methods are normally used in clinical settings, and rarely in developmental research.

The commonest method for assessing emotions in children is observation of the relationship between elicitors and expressions. The emotional behaviour is usually studied by means of video recording while the child is performing a specific task in the laboratory. Observation in natural environments is also possible, but is much more rarely used.

All experts accept the fact that basic emotions are present in children from birth, and that the more complex ones become established successively according to a schedule. The basic emotions of joy, sadness, anger, fear and interest appear before the more complex ones, such as guilt, empathy, pride or shame.

Observing the child's reactions to elicitors such as sweet and bitter drinks, restraints or sudden noises has constituted the basis of many experiments on children's emotions (Watson & Morgan, 1917). Another procedure has consisted in taking photos of children in the presence of elicitors in a natural context and showing the pictures to judges who are requested to identify the emotions in them. The emotions identified most accurately through this method in children 1 to 9 months old are: happiness (81%), sadness (78%), surprise (69%), anger (41%) and disgust (37%) (Izard, 1980). Concordance among judges improves when they [Page 325]are able to see the sequence elicitor-expressive facial response. Another assessment strategy has been to observe child-mother, child-stranger or child-peers interaction during a playing task. The facial emotional response has been found to be similar in many cross-cultural studies (Mesquita & Frijda, 1992), with judges clearly identifying emotions on looking at photographs of people from other cultures (Ekman, 1973).

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