The handbook provides comprehensive coverage of emotion research across a broad range of topics through concise, easily readable chapters. It addresses not only the foundational topics of emotional development, regulation and temperament, but it also provides extensive coverage of emerging areas at the forefront of research. The book details cutting-edge research methods in emotional development, including computational approaches, virtual reality, and ecological momentary assessment methods. In addition, it examines such emerging research topics as the role of emotions in sleep, music, social media/screen time use, and play. And it does all of this in a novel, concise format to make the material digestible and easy to read.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Individual emotions, states, and moods, including a broad range of negative and prosocial emotions.
• The effects of social factors and relationships on emotion development (e.g., gender, attachment, parent-child relationships, paternal influence).
• Emotion and broader developmental domains (e.g., cognition, language, sleep, play).
• Culture and context in emotional development, including emotional competence and moral behavior across settings (e.g., education, digital platforms, conflict zones).
• Emotional development across the lifespan, from prenatal to late adulthood.
• Alternative emotional development trajectories that may be affected by such issues as deprivation, maltreatment, atypical development.

The Handbook of Emotional Development is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians, therapists, lab technicians, and all related professionals in developmental, clinical child, and school psychology, social work, public health, child and adolescent psychiatry, pediatrics, and related disciplines.

Vanessa LoBue, Ph.D., is a Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at Rutgers University in Newark. She received her B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Dr. LoBue’s research examines the development of emotional processes across infancy and early childhood. She is particularly interested in the ways in which early environmental contexts shape trajectories of emotional development and risk for anxiety. Her research has contributed to a growing understanding of how early-emerging attention biases unfold over time and interact with caregiving and broader contextual factors. Through this work, she aims to advance theoretical models of emotional development and inform interventions that support children’s mental health.

Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Ph.D., is the McCourtney Professor of Child Studies and a Professor of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. She received her A.B. from Dartmouth College and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Pérez-Edgar’s research focuses on the relations between temperament and psychopathology. In particular, she examines how individual differences in attention can work to ameliorate or exacerbate risks associated with early temperament traits. Dr. Pérez-Edgar is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and currently the Editor-in-Chief of Developmental Psychology.

Kristin A. Buss, PhD., is the Tracy Winfree and Ted H. McCourtney Professor of Children, Work, and Families, Professor of Psychology and Human Development and Family Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She received her B.S. from the University of Minnesota and her M.S. and PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Buss’ research focuses on understanding the temperamental factors and emotional processes – reactivity and regulation – that account for the development of social anxiety problems across development. In particular, her work focuses on early-appearing fear dysregulation as a specific marker of increased risk for social anxiety disorder symptoms across childhood into adolescence. Dr. Buss is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences and currently the Head of the Department of Psychology.