The Future of Affective Science: Introduction to the Special Issue.

Modern affective science-the empirical study of emotional responding and affective experience-has been active for a half-century. The special issue considers the history of this field and proposes new directions for the decades ahead. Contributors represent diverse theoretical perspectives, methodological expertise, and domains of study, and the special issue includes both literature reviews and new empirical studies as illustrations.

Progress in understanding the emergence of human emotion.

In the past several decades, research on emotional development has flourished. Scientists have made progress in understanding infants', children's, and adults' abilities to recognize, communicate, and regulate their emotions. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered.

Faces in the wild: A naturalistic study of children's facial expressions in response to an Internet prank.

There is surprisingly little empirical evidence supporting theoretical and anecdotal claims regarding the spontaneous production of prototypic facial expressions used in numerous emotion recognition studies. Proponents of innate prototypic expressions believe that this lack of evidence may be due to ethical restrictions against presenting powerful elicitors in the lab. The current popularity of internet platforms designed for public sharing of videos allows investigators to shed light on this debate by examining naturally-occurring facial expressions outside the laboratory.

Emotional development through the lens of affective social competence.

Emotion competence, particularly as manifested within social interaction (i.e., affective social competence) is an important contributor to children's optimal social and psychological functioning.

Children's prototypic facial expressions during emotion-eliciting conversations with their mothers.

Despite theoretical claims that emotions are primarily communicated through prototypic facial expressions, empirical evidence is surprisingly scarce. This study aimed to (a) test whether children produced more components of a prototypic emotional facial expression during situations judged or self-reported to involve the corresponding emotion than situations involving other emotions (termed "intersituational specificity"), (b) test whether children produced more components of the prototypic expression corresponding to a situation's judged or self-reported emotion than components of other emotional expressions (termed "intrasituational specificity"), and (c) examine coherence between children's self-reported emotional experience and observers' judgments of children's emotions. One hundred and 20 children (ages 7-9) were video-recorded during a discussion with their mothers.