Emotional development can be described as the emergence of a child’s self-regulation out of coregulation by their caregivers, especially parents. This chapter highlights this transition, focusing on two interwoven facets of emotional development: the regulation of actions by emotions and the regulation of emotions by volitionally applied actions, called reflective emotion regulation. The significance of parental coregulation strategies is considered, specifically how they contribute to the differentiation of emotion qualities throughout ontogenesis as well as to a conceptual awareness of a child’s own elicited feelings and the inferred feelings of others, which is required for reflective emotion regulation. The chapter addresses core parental strategies such as context selection and modification, affect mirroring, modeling, reflective functioning and talking about emotions as well as levels of coregulation, and also presents a brief overview of the field. The chapter closes with a look at noteworthy issues for further research.

This chapter describes the development of prosocial motives and the social contexts within which these motives emerge and differentiate. Initially, prosocial behavior is based on a blend of motives, namely, participating in social interaction and early forms of feeling for others. During early childhood, concern-based guilt emerges and mere participation transforms into contributing to collaborative activities. During childhood, the normative turn complements these motives by a sense of obligation (living up to), and, during adolescence, aspiring to one’s ideal self can become an important prosocial motive. In this sense, doing good often is an expression of central human motives, namely, belonging to others, feeling for others, contributing to joint endeavors, affirming a sense of responsibility and normative obligation, and striving for our ideal selves.