Emotion and Feeling in Parent-Child Dyads: Neurocognitive and Psychophysiological Pathways of Development

Although widely used across disciplines, the terms emotion and feeling remain conceptually ambiguous, particularly within developmental science. Emotion is defined as an evolutionarily conserved, biologically embedded system of action readiness and intersubjective communication, shaped by attentional, neural, and physiological reactivity to environmental salience. In contrast, feeling is conceptualized as the consciously experienced, representational outcome of emotional activation, emerging through cognitive appraisal and symbolic processing. Building upon this distinction, the review explores how emotion develops within parent-child dyads through coregulated neurocognitive and psychophysiological mechanisms. Drawing on empirical evidence from eye-tracking studies of visual attention to emotional faces, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) research on social-emotional activation in prefrontal brain regions, and cortisol-based assessments of hormonal synchrony, the paper highlights how emotional attunement and transmission are embedded in early caregiving interactions. The review also emphasizes the moderating role of environmental sensitivity-both in children and parents-in shaping these developmental pathways. By positioning emotion as a dynamic, intersubjective process and feeling as its emergent experiential correlate, this review offers a novel developmental framework for understanding affect and proposes directions for future research on resilience, dysregulation, and intervention.