Comment: Developing and Maintaining High-Quality Relationships via Emotion

Abstract

This comment addresses opportunities for understanding the social functions of emotion by taking a developmental perspective. I agree that understanding emotions and their development will meaningfully illuminate understanding of prosociality in everyday life. Taking Vaish and Hepach’s (2020) approach one step further, I suggest that rather than using the framing of questions about prosociality from the adult literature to guide questions about the development of social emotions in children, in the future, developmental researchers consider the social milieu in which emotions evolved and in which children’s emotions may develop, to guide their questions. This may feed forward to a richer understanding of cooperation and reciprocity in the literature regarding adult strangers.