This essay presents a view about infant emotions that has emerged from our
laboratory in recent years. It is entitled "biosocial" for simplicity (our frame
of reference obviously being developmental psychology) and for emphasis of
a neglected interface between biological and social aspects of emotional
development. In appreciation of the high degree of organized complexity in
human functioning, I argue for the usefulness of a "levels of meaning"
approach for understanding infant emotional development. Although the
paper highlights aspects of our own work, a special plea is made for
interdisciplinary collaborative research efforts at a critical time in the
development of our field. I conclude with some thoughts about the adaptive
nature of infant emotions and their signaling functions.

The extraordinary extent of organized complexity in human functioning is an
essential background for our thinking about development. Indeed, modern
biology has been characterized as the biology of organized complexity, in
contrast to a biology of former times that was mainly concerned with linear
and noninteractive effects. Platt ( 1966) has emphasized that an evolutionary
perspective shows man to be the most complex entity of the universe; and, for
scientists, such complexity forever ensures a large amount of indeterminacy
and privacy with respect to understanding human behavior. As aspects of an
individual's complex functioning, it is not surprising that human emotions
elude precise or comprehensive definition.

One thing is certain: In the field of infant emotions, in the study of
increasingly organized complexity, we cannot proceed from isolation. We
need multiple views that tap different levels of meaning. Emotions are parts of
an array of complex human systems that are in continuous interaction, that
are often hierarchically arranged at different levels of organization, and that
can be characterized as having varying degrees of stability or change.

In this connection, I believe there is one view about emotions that can be
misleading. In this view, verbal designations of emotion states offer
temporary shortcuts for description before scientific specification is possible.
In one form or another, this has been put forth by Hebb ( 1946) and his work
with chimpanzees, by Mandler ( 1975) in a general way, and by Bowlby ( 1969)
and Kagan ( 1978) in consideration of work with human infants. An
implication of this view is that emotion terms are useful only at an early stage
of investigation, that they represent only global, intuitive, and inexact
formulations, and that with the advance of science, designation of "emotion
states" will become unnecessary. We think there is more to it ( Emde &

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