Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development

How children and adolescents learn to manage their emotions shapes whether they develop anxiety, depression, or behavioral difficulties — and whether those problems persist into adulthood. Researchers in this area track developmental trajectories across childhood and adolescence, asking how capacities like emotion regulation emerge, how they go wrong, and what role parenting and family environment play in either protecting or placing young people at risk. A central challenge is distinguishing normal emotional turbulence from the early signs of clinically significant psychopathology, since the same behavior can mean very different things depending on a child's age and developmental stage. Active work is focused on identifying which early intervention points are most consequential and on understanding why some children recover from adversity while others do not.

Works

191,142

Total citations

4,898,364

Keywords

Emotion RegulationPsychopathologyChildrenAdolescentsDevelopmental TrajectoriesMental Health