Emotional Development: The View From Between

Abstract

It is an honor to be able to engage Ezequiel Di Paolo’s and David Sander’s reflections on relational conceptions of emotional development. In this reply, I elaborate on the role of emotion in the open-ended construction of self. Di Paolo suggests that emotions are “collectively constituted ways of regulating human becoming” (2020, p. 229); Sander (2020) maintains that as felt modes of engagement, emotions play a central role in processes related to teaching, learning, and education. These assertions are consistent with the idea that emotional experiences develop as a product of relations that occur between persons, and that the relational construction of emotion lies at the center of the developmental construction of personhood.