Emotion Understanding, Expression, and Regulation in Early Childhood

Abstract

As one of the most fundamental abilities to gain in early childhood, emotion development is correlated to the interaction with one’s surroundings. Based on the review of previous studies, this paper explored children’s social-emotional development through emotional understanding, emotional expressiveness, emotional regulation, and the influence of family dynamics on individual development. Besides the researches on typically developing children’s emotion regulation, this paper also analyzed the difficulties of emotion regulation on individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). This paper indicated that parent-child talking and the use of picture book had been assessed to positively influence children’s emotional development. In the future, more studies can be conducted to deeply explore interactive mechanisms of society, family and peer experiences to understand the independent and mutual effects of each factors on developments of young children’s social knowledge, focusing on the dynamic and interactive process between the three and helping parents establish a high-quality parent-child emotional response state and promote children’s emotion socialization.