Interpersonal Development in Infancy: The Interconnectedness of Emotion Understanding and Social Cognition

Understanding emotion in interpersonal contexts involves appreciating others’ relations with the environment. This ability is related fundamentally to social cognition, including understanding the actions and goals of social partners. However, the significance of infants’ emotion understanding has been largely underemphasized in recent studies on infants’ social-cognitive development. In this review, we highlight the interconnectedness of emotion understanding and social cognition in socioemotional development. We incorporate a relational view of emotion to bridge empirical and theoretical work on emotional and social-cognitive development, and to demonstrate the utility of this approach for advancing novel areas of inquiry. KEYWORDS—emotional development; social cognition; emotion understanding Understanding emotion is linked inherently with social cognition. To understand others’ emotions is to comprehend the significance of the relations of other individuals with their goals and environment (1, 2). Likewise, social cognition encompasses many emotion-related skills, such as understanding goal directedness (3), representing intentions (4, 5), and evaluating others’ needs and coordinating helpful responses (see 6, 7). Thus, it is important to consider how the developmental processes of emotion understanding and social cognition are interrelated. In this review, we highlight the overlap of emotion understanding and social cognition in infants from a developmental perspective. In our view, empirical and theoretical treatments of social-cognitive development frequently underemphasize the contribution of infants’ emotion understanding to their appreciation of others’ behavior (see 8, 9 though see also 10). The aim of this review is not to devalue research on psychological reasoning in infants, but to underscore how greater consideration of infants’ emotion understanding can enrich research on socialcognitive development. In the next sections, we discuss how emotional and social-cognitive development are linked, then suggest opportunities for integrating emotion into research on infants’ psychological reasoning. EMOTION UNDERSTANDING AND SOCIAL-COGNITIVE