Introduction: Advances in developmental psychology: theoretical and empirical perspectives

This thematic focus comprises five invited contributions from developmental psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists whose research centers on the communicative and social dimensions of children’s early cognitive development. It provides a rich and updated overview of the main advances in developmental psychology from different theoretical and empirical perspectives. The selection of the contributions has been guided by the intent to offer the reader a wide range of alternative views on children’s early cognitive abilities, thereby giving representativeness to different theoretical approaches and providing a comprehensive picture of the main debates and research directions in the field. We are convinced that child development research is facing a challenging and complex task that can no longer be postponed, given the numerous, and high-quality studies on infants’ cognitive abilities on the one hand, and the increasing empirical evidence on very young infant’s ability to read the context and to be receptive to emotional reactions to stimuli. There has been a tendency, so far, to separate cognitive development from the self-regulatory development of emotions in early childhood. We believe that this separation in developmental psychology and cognitive science needs to be overcome; in this regard, the Focus we proudly present in this issue of “Mefisto” has the humble intention of beginning to intertwine these fields of investigation. Among all the sophisticated cognitive and affective capacities, we believe that infant communication can offer fertile ground for such a meeting. If we accept the assumption that human emotional experience – throughout the individual life span – is inseparable from the relationships and social contexts in which it arises, we can identify the parameters that define the social context and how the latter change throughout development. The following essays offer insightful suggestions along these lines.