C Social and Emotional Development
Psychologists interested in social and emotional development focus on relationships, the growth of social skills and social understanding, and the influence of the social world on emotional life. Social relationships begin with the attachments that infants develop with their caregivers. Social life expands considerably with the growth of peer relationships in childhood, romantic relationships in adolescence, marriage and child-rearing in adulthood, and friendships in the workplace, neighborhood, and elsewhere. The people in a person’s social world—parents, relatives, friends, and others—help to shape that person’s emotional life. They provide infants with a sense of security, provoke the first feelings of pride, shame, guilt, or embarrassment in young children, and offer experiences of nurturance, conflict, and love at all ages.
The importance of social relationships to the regulation of emotion is a topic that interests developmental scientists across the life course. A baby depends on caregivers to manage his or her distress, and children learn to manage emotions by seeking assistance and talking about their feelings with trusted adults. Adolescents rely on their peers for emotional understanding, and adults maintain emotional well-being through supportive friendships, especially in later life. Researchers are exploring these social influences on emotion regulation in observational studies of people of all ages, and through interviews with children, adolescents, and adults about how they manage their feelings.
D Personality Development
The study of personality development explores how the distinctive qualities of people develop over life: their characteristic social and emotional dispositions, self-concept, views of the world, and ways of acting and thinking. Personality development is closely related to social and emotional development, but it is also much broader. It encompasses the emergence of a distinctive temperament early in life, growth in self-understanding and identity, formation of personal goals and values, and the influence of one’s adult roles—such as marital partner, parent, and worker.
One of the scientific challenges of studying personality development is determining the extent to which personality is based on family upbringing or on genetically inherited dispositions. Certainly, parents influence their children’s personalities in many important ways: in the examples they provide, in their warmth and style of discipline, and in the security or insecurity they inspire. But parents and their biological children are also genetically related, and studies of identical twins raised by different families have concluded that much of the resemblance between parents’ and children’s personalities is based on hereditary similarity. Even so, many characteristics in children are not easily explained by heredity, which makes continued study of the interaction of genes and family influence—nature and nurture—important to developmental science.
E Moral Development
Moral development concerns the development of moral values and behavior. Moral values are beliefs about what is right and wrong; moral behavior refers to actions consistent with these beliefs. Moral development is closely tied to other aspects of psychological growth. The ability to think and reason enables moral judgment, social and emotional development leads to moral values and empathy, and personality development includes the growth of conscience. Moral development is a lifelong process, especially as individuals encounter new and more complex ethical dilemmas in relations with peers, at the workplace, and in intimate relationships.
Young children acquire a sense of right and wrong partly through parental discipline but also in everyday conversations with their parents, who convey simple lessons about people’s feelings, the consequences of breaking rules, and what it takes to be a “good boy” or “good girl.” Another resource for early moral growth is the empathy that young children feel for the distress of others. For example, when parents or peers are upset, toddlers often look concerned and try to assist them. Psychologists continue to explore how interaction between parents and their young children contributes to the development of conscience and to the growth of caring for other people.
Moral development also influences the development of “prosocial” or altruistic behavior—actions such as sharing, cooperating, and helping performed for the benefit of others without expectation of a reward. Studies indicate that the motivation to act altruistically emerges very early. Young children are motivated to do the right thing primarily because they want to maintain warm relationships with caregivers and others who matter to them—not simply to avoid punishment, as was once believed.
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