Ontogenesis of Emotions and Their Regulation

The most important trends in development have already been sketched in Chapter 1: (1) During ontogenesis, the corpus of emotions increases in diversity; that is, new emotions emerge. (2) However, they decline in frequency and intensity (of expression). (3) Emotions “desomatize”; in other words, their attendant expressive and body reactions can become invisible to outsiders. (4) Emotions become increasingly accessible to regulation; that is, their intensity, duration, and quality can be modified voluntarily. The idea behind the present chapter is to rank these developmental trends in ontogenetic sequence, to describe the underlying developmental mechanisms, and to present empirical findings that support the assumptions of our internalization model on the course and mechanisms of development.