Emotional intelligence has attracted significant research and popular attention for its role in predicting life outcomes — sometimes more strongly than cognitive intelligence. Understanding how it develops in the early years, and what supports its development, is practically useful for parents and caregivers.
Healthbooq provides evidence-based guidance on emotional development across the early years.
What Emotional Intelligence Is
The Mayer-Salovey model of emotional intelligence identifies four capacities:
- Perceiving emotions: Accurately recognising emotional expressions in faces, voices, and bodies
- Using emotions: Using emotional information to facilitate thinking and problem-solving
- Understanding emotions: Knowing that emotions have causes, consequences, and complexity (that pride requires achievement; that feeling angry at someone you love is possible)
- Managing emotions: Regulating one's own emotions and influencing others' emotions appropriately
Each of these capacities develops through the early years, with the foundations laid in the caregiver-infant relationship and the primary social environment.
The Early Foundations
Perceiving emotions (0–24 months): Developed through the infant's early experience of reading caregiver faces and voices. By 12 months, infants can discriminate between happy, surprised, and angry facial expressions. By 24 months, discrimination is more refined and extends to more subtle states.
Using emotions (12–36 months): The use of social referencing (using an adult's emotional response to calibrate one's own behaviour in an ambiguous situation) is an early form of using emotional information adaptively. By 36 months, children can direct their attention toward what they are interested in and away from what is distressing.
Understanding emotions (24–48 months): From the late second year, children begin to understand that emotions have causes ("She's crying because she fell"). By 3–4 years, they can understand that people feel differently about the same event, and that feelings can be complex or mixed.
Managing emotions (18 months onwards): Self-regulation capacity develops gradually from the co-regulated early months, with meaningful independent regulatory capacity emerging progressively through the second and third years.
What Builds Emotional Intelligence in the Early Years
Caregiver emotion coaching. When adults name emotions, explore their causes and consequences, and model reflective emotional processing, children develop more sophisticated emotional understanding.
Emotional language exposure. Consistent use of emotion vocabulary in everyday contexts builds the emotional lexicon that is the foundation of emotional understanding.
Secure attachment. Securely attached children show better emotional recognition, more empathic responding, and more effective emotional regulation than insecurely attached peers.
Rich social environments. Peer interaction, particularly in contexts where emotional negotiation is required (sharing, turn-taking, conflict resolution), provides essential practice in social emotional skills.
Key Takeaways
Emotional intelligence — the cluster of capacities involving recognising, understanding, managing, and using emotional information — has foundations that develop in the first years of life. The building blocks are laid through everyday emotional interactions with caregivers and peers. The early development of emotional intelligence predicts a wide range of outcomes in social relationships, academic engagement, and wellbeing.
