Epilogue: Emotion communication and relationship context

The papers that comprise this Special Section on emotional development in interpersonal relationships are noteworthy in many respects. Most notable is that the majority of the investigators examined emotional development in older children and adolescents, and only two papers examined young children between the ages of 3 and 5 years. Much of the theoretical underpinnings of how emotion develops has been based on infants and toddlers, and consequently, there has been a distinct gap in theory development for how emotion develops further in older age groups. To be sure, several authors in this special section address attachment history and attachment representation as a way to explore the role of individual differences in how emotional experience is regulated, but what emerged powerfully across all the papers was how the current and immediate relationship context affected: (a) patterns of emotional-expressive behaviour; (b) coping with emotional provocation or stress; (c) self-reports about emotion-related behaviour and experience; and (d) ratings by others about the children’s emotional-social functioning. What I would like to elaborate here is how we can think about the role of context and the attribution of meaning as emotion is evoked (not when it is re ected upon at a considerably later point in time). I think that these issues of immediacy—context and meaning—are important to address if we want to make sense of how children and youth develop emotionally. I will also emphasise emotion communication in my discussion—for when we are addressing how emotion plays out in social interaction, we are talking about transactional phenomena, such as interpersonal negotiation, impression management, processes of social in uence, sympathy and social support, among other constructs.