The Role of Emotion in the Development of Child Psychopathology: A Commentary on Zahn-Waxier

This chapter provides a commentary on Carolyn Zahn-Waxler's ideas on developmental psychopathology presented in the previous section. The chapter explores the implications of these theoretical and empirical studies on the linkage between psychopathology and emotion through an analysis of the framework used by Zahn-Waxler to examine the role of emotion in normative and nonnormative developmental phenomena. This is followed by a clarification on the concept of emotional dysregulation and an illustration of how this fails in linking emotion and pathology on several key areas. The issues identified in the temperament domain-stability and physiology-are explored while another section presents various methods to utilize the ideas gleaned from this domain to reduce reliance on flawed exploratory constructs such as the previously discussed dysregulation. The final section discusses several vital issues regarding emotion-related processes which have been neglected by existing research on the mechanisms of transmission of parental psychopathology.