Emotion and the Development of Psychopathology

Abstract

This chapter considers the role of emotion in the development of psychopathology through the lens of the functional perspective on emotional development. First, a brief historical perspective on conceptualizations of the nature of emotion is offered, followed by a discussion of the view of emotion from the functional perspective. After summarizing prevailing views on the relation between emotional functioning and psychopathology, the chapter draws from the developmental psychopathology perspective, focusing on the typical development of emotional competence as a counterpoint to the development of psychopathology. Emotional competence is defined from the functional perspective, including its three main components: emotion expression, emotion understanding, and emotion regulation. Then the typical development of each of these components is described as well as the risks for psychopathology that are associated with each component. Conclusions about the central role of emotion in the development of competence and psychopathology are summarized with particular attention to what a functional perspective offers for future directions for research on this topic. Finally, translational implications of this perspective for clinical assessment and intervention are discussed.

Second-by-second infant and mother emotion regulation and coregulation processes

“…It is also important to note that our results are specific to the time interval (1-s lag) employed in our analyses and may change if a different time interval is considered (Asparouhov et al, 2018). Rather than examining children's emotional responding across discrete time intervals, treating time as continuous, as in differential equations, may offer a complementary approach to examining dynamic, continuously unfolding regulatory processes, although these methods are not as well developed as discrete-time models (Cole et al, 2016;Hamaker, Cuelemans, Grasman, & Tuerlinckx, 2015). Similarly, our examination of context-appropriate vagal functioning was well suited for free play, a task with limited demands for infants to increase arousal.…”

Emerging Sensitivity to Socially Complex Expressions: A Unique Role for Adolescence?

“…Developing competence in emotion processing includes the abilities to perceive, interpret, and understand emotions, and requires many component skills, like the ability to detect a range of cues like prosody, body language, and theory of mind . Here, we focus on a basic component of emotion processing: the ability to visually perceive and categorize emotion expressions , particularly complex (i.e., nonbasic) expressions.…”

Within‐mother variability in vagal functioning and concurrent socioemotional dysregulation

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Emotion regulation refers to a dynamic process involving patterns of internal biological rhythms, subjective experience, and observed nonverbal and verbal behavior that enables people to relate to their changing social environment in ways that facilitate goal attainment and preserve well-being (Cole, 2016). In contrast, emotion dysregulation, broadly implicated in psychopathology, can be seen in emotional experience (behavioral, subjective, and physiological) that is either underregulated (e.g., excessive in intensity or duration of expressed emotion) or overregulated (e.g., blunted emotion experience) and interferes with adaptive behavior in one's environment (Beauchaine, 2015;Cole et al, 1994).

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“…requires attention to temporally sensitive, multimodal processes, which involve change in mother's emotional experience and expression to support goal-directed behavior in the context of parenting (Cole, 2016;Teti & Cole, 2011). Evaluating moment-by-moment variation in physiological functioning may offer a unique window into temporally based processes associated with maternal socioemotional dysregulation, which may have downstream effects on both maternal and child well-being, especially among families facing socioeconomic and contextual adversity.…”