Introduction to the Special Section on Social in the Emotional and the Emotional in the Social

Human emotional life is intertwined with social experience from the very start of the lifespan to the end of the journey. Many of our first experiences of momentous sadness, happiness, and anger result from interactions with others. Emotions only come alive when in interaction with other people – they are understood to have meaning, displayed to and practiced with others, and reinterpreted and modified by social feedback (Sroufe, 1996). This implies that social relationships provide the interactions that are the resources for emotional development. Moreover, with maturity, emotional displays (or the lack of them) and other emotion regulatory skills can guide and change relationships over time, and emotional competence can underlie changes in social resources and relationships. Thus, emotions and social relationships are almost inseparable, and considering their joint emergence and bidirectional influences on each other can help explain many of today’s most significant developmental questions. These include the troubling questions about the onset and progression of many forms of dissatisfaction, disengagement and psychopathology, as well as the important focus on understanding the emergence of resilience and optimal outcomes (Compas, Connor-Smith, Saltzman, Thomsen, & Wadsworth, 2001; Southam-Gerow & Kendall, 2002). It also includes questions about the best ways to prevent or intervene to reduce health problems and to promote greater resilience in the face of threats, challenges, and losses (Zimmer-Gembeck & Skinner, 2016).

Although there have been several recent special issues in this journal on emotional competence or, more specifically, emotional regulation, no recent volume has focused on the role of social relationships in the development of socio-emotional competence or the capacity for optional emotion regulation, at the same time as recognizing that emotions and emotion regulation may play a role in social interactions with others and relationship development. This special section on Social in the Emotional and the Emotional in the Social is unique by bringing together research on the social aspects of children’s lives with their emotional developmental competencies. Each paper acknowledges the important role of social relationships in emotion development, or the role of emotion recognition, emotional display and regulation, socio-emotional competence or emotion-related coping with stress in understanding how social relationships may function or change. It brings together six empirical studies (most longitudinal in design) and one review, with each paper concentrating on developmental processes and/or bidirectional associations linking the emotional and social worlds of children, adolescents or young adults.

In organizing this volume, no specific definition of emotional expression, recognition, regulation or of social relationships or socialization was provided. Instead, the purpose was to allow for breadth of focus. Thus, emotion was allowed to range from young children’s emotional expression and emotion regulation to adolescents’ emotional responding to young adults’ coping responses. Also on the social side of the equation, the focus ranged from teachers’ emotion socialization and support to peer acceptance and stress to attachment and family stress. Thus, the research covered three significant socialization forces in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood – parents, friends and other peers, and teachers – and spanned multiple age groups, from young children in preschool or kindergarten to older children and adolescents, and emerging and young adults. Moreover, most studies did not assume associations would be found among all participants or under all circumstances. Moderators of associations were often examined, and these included children’s temperament, children’s gender, and comparisons of emotion regulation when participants were primed with interpersonal insecurity or when no prime was used.

In the first paper (Bassett, Denham, Fettig, Curby, Mohtasham, & Austin, 2016), the teaching environment was considered as a context that would be important for young children’s learning and displays of their emerging socio-emotional capacity within a very important newly emerging domain of relationships – with their peers. Young children in the US were observed at preschool in order to identify how teachers can socialize changes in their socio-emotional behaviors with peers over two semesters of a school year. Children displayed either more positive or fewer negative socio-emotional behaviors, or were better regulated, when interacting with peers at T2 relative to T1 when they had teachers who displayed more supportive and less unsupportive reactions to emotions, or who validated children’s emotions. Yet, the findings were very much more complicated. For example, sometimes children appeared to be higher in socio-emotional competence when teacher’s socializing behaviors were more unsupportive. Also, children lower in surgency (a temperamental tendency to approach rather than withdraw from novel situations) were most susceptible to the socializing behaviors of their teachers. These findings make it clear that responses to socialization may differ, even when socialization appears to be positive in tone. Children’s responses to teachers’ behaviors, whether positive or negative in valence, may be shaped by the characteristics and histories of those involved.

In the second study in this special section, teachers’ support and children’s own characteristics (emotional reactivity) were also quite relevant to understanding children’s patterns of classroom emotional engagement and achievement (Pitzer & Skinner, 2016). Analyzing data collected via surveys completed by US children two times across a school year, students’ own perceptions of their personal resources, including their sense of relatedness, competence and autonomy at school, were most strongly associated with an increase in motivational resilience over the school year. Yet, negative emotion was also linked to declining resilience over time. Conversely, children higher in motivational resilience and lower in negative emotion showed greater increases in their personal resources and perceived more teacher support over time; motivational resilience was also associated with improved academic achievement over time. When these processes were isolated to students at high risk because of their tendency towards catastrophizing about failures and setbacks, findings suggested that teachers may have the greatest impact on children’s motivational resilience and achievement when they can remain supportive of those who are displaying negative patterns of emotion and behavior. Also, children’s emotional reactivity could be positive or negative for school relationships and success depending on the children’s history, and level of school engagement and achievement. As stated here, emotional reactivity “seems to contain not only elements of risk, but also elements of how much students care (Lemos, 2002): If things are going well, emotional reactivity seems to be a marker for commitment or investment, but if things are going poorly it can exacerbate ongoing negative cycles and undermine students’ motivational resources” (Pitzer & Skinner, 2016, p. 11).

In the next two papers, the investigators argued for peer relationship functioning as a direct outcome of and influence on emotional responding (Hernández et al., 2015) or as a specific context that might modify emotional patterns of responding to stress (Uink, Modecki, & Barber, 2016). Using observations and peer ratings of peer acceptance, Hernández et al. investigated how peer acceptance may both promote and follow from children's capacity for effortful control, defined as the ability to inhibit behavior and focus attention, and their expression and feelings of positive and negative emotions. Findings showed that greater peer acceptance predicted an increase in children’s effortful control and, conversely, children’s emotional responding predicted their increasing peer acceptance over time. In addition, some findings only applied to girls or to those low in effortful control.

Taking a fine-grained approach to the understanding of the role of peer relationships in emotion responding, the fourth study in this special section relied on experience sampling data collected from socio-economically disadvantaged adolescents (Uink et al., 2016). Uink et al. (2016) examined whether the presence of social partners, mainly peers, moderated youths’ moment-to-moment emotional responses after a stressful event (assessed by asking “since you were last messaged, has anything bad happened to you?”) (Uink et al., 2016, p. 4). Overall, adolescents spent much of their time with peers. Here, presence of peers was defined as in-person, on-line, or with both peers and family. Adolescents reported more happiness and less sadness when in the presence of peers than when they were with only family or alone. Peer presence was also associated with dampened post-stress sadness compared to being with family or alone, and dampened post-stress worry compared to being alone. Gender of the adolescent moderated some of these effects. These findings lead to further questions, including the question of for whom might these peer effects be most beneficial? Also, research on the mechanisms that could account for the dampening impact of peers on emotion would be useful. Are peers a distraction from stress, are they providing direct assistance or support, is the feeling of belonging when being with peers enough to offset negative emotions related to stress, is the mere presence of peers soothing, or is there another explanation?

The final two empirical studies addressed some of these possibilities by examining coping with relationship stress (Seiffge-Krenke & Persike, 2016) or the role of attachment working models in emotion regulation (Clear & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2015). In their longitudinal study, Seiffge-Krenke and Persike investigated internalizing and externalizing symptoms reported at age 23 as outcomes of stressors and support with relationships with mothers, father and peers, and coping responses assessed up to 10 years earlier. Testing separate models for stress and support from mother, father, and peers, and placing a lens on differences between young men and women, their results showed that young women were more protected from stress and the emergence of symptoms when they had a history of more supportive relationships with their mothers, with their fathers or with their peers. In addition, young women who were more likely to withdraw to cope with stress were those most at risk for later symptoms. In contrast, such associations were not found among young men. In fact, more support was associated with a higher level of externalizing behavior among young men at age 23. As in previous studies in this special section (Bassett et al., 2016; Pitzer & Skinner, 2016), this again underscores how relationships and the support they are perceived to provide may not always have the expected impact, but instead may depend on the characteristics of the individual who is receiving or experiencing the support.

In the final empirical study in this special section (Clear & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2015), participants were randomly assigned to report their emotion regulation following an attachment insecurity prime or to report their emotion regulation without a prime. Correlations between attachment and emotion regulation tended to be consistent with adult attachment theory, and were also consistent with the notion that sadness and worry are emotions that signal a need for interpersonal support, whereas anger may be an emotion that can create greater interpersonal distance. Attachment security, which is expected to be associated with greater emotional awareness and flexibility, was associated with less dysregulation of all emotions and also less suppression of sadness and worry. In contrast, insecure–anxious attachment, which is expected to be marked by greater fear of rejection and worry about the availability of others, was associated with greater dysregulation of all emotions and associated with more suppression of anger. Insecure–avoidant attachment, which is expected to be marked by a preference for interpersonal distance and a greater desire for self-reliance, was associated with more suppression of sadness and worry, but more anger dysregulation. Insecurity priming prior to completing the emotion regulation questions did result in heightened reports of dysregulation of sadness and anger, and insecurity priming had an effect on one association between attachment and emotion regulation – insecure–avoidant attachment was more strongly associated with sadness suppression in the priming compared to the no priming condition. Consistent with the findings of other studies in this special section, individual characteristics, such as temperament (Bassett et al., 2016; Hernández et al., 2015), gender (Seiffge-Krenke & Persike, 2016; Uink et al., 2016) or working models of attachment (Clear & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2015), may modify the impact of social relationships on emotion or change how emotions impact on social relationships.

The final paper in this special section presents the findings of a review of 23 studies of non-questionnaire studies of the parent–child attachment relationship as a correlate of offsprings’ emotion regulation or coping responses to stressful events (Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2015). Most of this research had been conducted with toddlers and there was general support for the theory that parent–child attachment plays a significant role in offspring’s development of emotion regulation and coping with stress (Kobak, Cassidy, Lyons-Ruth, & Zir, 2006). Insecure–ambivalent (anxious) attachment identified children at risk for a number of maladaptive emotion regulatory patterns, whereas secure attachment had some advantages for more adaptive emotion regulation. Findings for avoidant attachment were less clear. Also, there were noticeably fewer studies of older children and adolescents, as compared to toddlers and young children.

This review (Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2015) ends the special section by raising a number of questions, which were considered in different ways across the six empirical studies in this special section: Are the associations between social relationships and emotions universal or do they depend on multiple characteristics and conditions? For example, would social relationships play a different role in emotional reactivity and regulation depending on features of the individuals involved or the context, depending on what is triggering the emotion, or depending on the emotion that needs regulating? This final review paper in this special section also raises the possibility that some aspects of each of these studies could be integrated to better assess how attachment and more specific socialization processes of parents, teachers, and peers might work together as foundations for emotional reactivity and regulation, and in turn how emotional experiences may modify working models of attachment or the responses of social partners over time (e.g., see Calkins & Hill, 2007). The studies in this special section also provide many intriguing suggestions for future research. Such recommendations are important, because the journey to a shared understanding of emotion and social developmental pathways is arguably a protracted one. There is extensive work to be done, towards both understanding each on their own, and how they interface and influence each other over childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. The papers in this special section have helped to progress us in this regard, easing us down the road, and providing some sound advice for future research.