Social Emotional Development

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Social-emotional development represents a child’s growing ability to interact with others, to form attachments and relationships, to identify and regulate emotions, and to feel confident exploring the environment. Whereas both animals and human newborns display primitive, basic emotions, our ability for complex reasoning, use of language and introspection makes human social-emotional development far more sophisticated and complex. In this course, students will become acquainted with the latest theories and research findings related to human socio-emotional development from infancy to young adulthood, with knowledge derived from psychosocial, clinical, psychiatry and social affective neuroscience fields. All topics will be approached by taking into account the influence of, and interactions between, person-related factors (biological constitution, temperament, cognitive capacity), social context related factors (parenting, peers or broader social-cultural influences), and neurobiological (brain) development.

The course starts with emotion expression/processing in infancy and its importance for the development of parent-child attachment. Subsequent topics are the influence of infant/child temperament on emotional-social development and how, in a later developmental phase, children learn to regulate their emotions and develop mental skills that enable them to process and reflect upon one’s own and others’ emotions and behaviors. Other topics are the childhood development of empathy, morality, helping behavior and self-concept. Finally, students will be acquainted with adolescence as an especially sensitive period for the development of specific socio-emotional problems. Next to normative social-emotional development students will also learn about the etiology of, and risk factors for the development of socio-emotional problems or disorders in the internalizing spectrum (anxiety and depression), the externalizing spectrum (conduct disorder, callous-unemotional traits), in personality (narcissism, psychopathy), and in autism, also paying attention to intervention/treatment possibilities and their effectivity.