Commentary: Difficulties assessing social and emotional behavior in large-scale national studies

Innovations in the assessment of emotional development provide new opportunities to track behavioral undercontrol from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood. Less attention is given to the assessment and measurement of negative affect. Questionnaires used to measure emotions and emotion-regulated behavior have strong psychometric properties. Large-scale population studies provide challenges for large assessment batteries and place great pressure for the use of short forms, but it is not always clear that short forms share the psychometrics strengths of their longer versions. Use of narratives provides opportunities to gain deeper insights into the child's experiential world. Overall, the diverse set of measurement tools that has been developed to assess emotion-regulated behavior during the earliest years contributes to our ability to design effective prevention programs or intervention strategies to shift developmental pathways.