Measuring Emotions in Infants and Children Based on Seminars Sponsored by the Committee on Social and Affective Development During Childhood of the Social Science Research Council - Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development

The twentieth century have seen a resurgence of interest in human emotion on the part of psychologists who have discovered that cognitive processes cannot be effectively studied in isolation. Both in the developmental roots of the ability to express and interpret emotions and the relation of emotion to learning and memory are receiving increasing attention. This volume, commissioned by the Social Science Research Council, brings together a strong group of researchers who have pioneered a wide variety of empirical approaches to the difficult problems of conceptualising and assessing emotion in infants and children. The methods they present range from biochemical and psychophysiological assessment techniques to self-report scales of subjective experience. Included are an efficient and reliable system that makes affective expression analysis feasible for large amounts of data and both well-established and fresh methods of measuring non-verbal sensitivity. The chapters constitute a comprehensive overview of the progress that has been made in the last decade. The volume will be an invaluable resource for all those who study infants and children.