Emotion and Feeling in Parent–Child Dyads: Neurocognitive and Psychophysiological Pathways of Development

TL;DR

This paper explores how emotions and feelings develop in parent-child relationships through brain and body processes, offering a new framework for understanding emotional development.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel developmental framework distinguishing emotion as a biological process and feeling as its conscious experience in parent-child dyads.

Findings

Emotional attunement in parent-child interactions is supported by synchronized neurocognitive and physiological mechanisms.

Environmental sensitivity moderates the development of emotional regulation and transmission in early caregiving.

Empirical evidence from eye-tracking, fNIRS, and cortisol studies supports the role of coregulation in emotional development.

Abstract

Although widely used across disciplines, the terms emotion and feeling remain conceptually ambiguous, particularly within developmental science. Emotion is defined as an evolutionarily conserved, biologically embedded system of action readiness and intersubjective communication, shaped by attentional, neural, and physiological reactivity to environmental salience. In contrast, feeling is conceptualized as the consciously experienced, representational outcome of emotional activation, emerging through cognitive appraisal and symbolic processing. Building upon this distinction, the review explores how emotion develops within parent–child dyads through coregulated neurocognitive and psychophysiological mechanisms. Drawing on empirical evidence from eye-tracking studies of visual attention to emotional faces, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) research on social-emotional activation in prefrontal brain regions, and cortisol-based assessments of hormonal synchrony, the paper highlights how emotional attunement and transmission are embedded in early caregiving interactions. The review also emphasizes the moderating role of environmental sensitivity—both in children and parents—in shaping these developmental pathways. By positioning emotion as a dynamic, intersubjective process and feeling as its emergent experiential correlate, this review offers a novel developmental framework for understanding affect and proposes directions for future research on resilience, dysregulation, and intervention.

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