The concluding chapter takes stock of findings and trends in the field, identifies key challenges, and highlights directions and methods for research. It focuses on the imbalance between the three elements comprising the field of emotion regulation in parenting: how parents regulate their own emotions, how parents regulate their own emotions in the context of parenting, and how parents regulate the child’s emotions during parent–child interaction. The most documented of the three is the regulation of the child’s emotions by the parent and its effect on child development. The chapter highlights other shortcomings, such as the importance given to parent-driven effects over child-driven effects, the predominance of correlational studies, and a tendency to simplify by considering the relationships between emotion regulation, parenting, and child development as linear and homogeneous. This chapter proposes future directions focusing on content and methodological issues to overcome the current limitations. Although much work has been done at the intersection of emotion regulation and parenting, much remains to be done. The perspectives proposed should stimulate research in this area.

Combinations of tones that are consonant (“nice”) are those that exhibit no slower beats. Beats occur when two periodic signals are close to the same frequency. For sinusoidal signals, the beat frequency is simply the difference between the two signals. For complex signals, one must also consider differences between multiples of the signal frequency. Thus, consonant combinations are those where the ratio of the frequencies is equal to a rational number. Of particular importance are rational numbers involving the ratio of small integers. The musical fifth corresponds to a frequency ratio of 3 to 2 and is an important part of music. A set of note frequencies used for a musical scale can be justified based on consonant combinations, and variations of the details of those choices, known as temperaments, are useful in music for practical reasons. In particular, the equal-tempered scale used for keyboards, based on multiples of the 12th root of 2, is very common.

This chapter discusses social theories. Although personal theories known as evolutionary theories, network theories, stimulus evaluation theories, response evaluation theories, and psychological constructionist theories already accept that emotions take place in a social context, the personal mechanisms that they propose seem ultimately inadequate to account for the complexity inherent in social interactions with multiple interaction partners and across time. This has inspired the birth of social extensions of personal theories, called social theories. Social theories have added the following social mechanisms to the mechanistic toolbox: emotional contagion, social appraisal, direct relation alignment, and distributed forms of social appraisal and goal-directed processes. The chapter also presents a taxonomy of behavior in social contexts with dichotomies such as social vs. non-social, coarse vs. subtle, direct vs. indirect, communicative vs. non-communicative, intentional vs. unintentional, and stimulus-driven vs. goal-directed. The addition of social (e.g., communicative) behavior increases the power of the goal-directed theory to account for the apparent irrationality of emotions.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is widely recognized as an important forerunner of the social network approach. This chapter discusses the impact of Simmel’s writings on the develop-ment of social network analysis and its relevance for contemporary research. I argue that Simmel’s work was both more influential and more systematic than has usually been acknow¬ledged. In the first part I trace Simmel’s influence on social network analysis by distingui¬shing between a general structural perspective and the adoption of concrete ideas, particularly formulated in his chapters on quantitative aspects and the “web of group affiliations”. In the second part the focus is on Simmel’s concept of forms of sociation (Formen der Vergesell¬schaftung). I argue that reference to so-called basic structural properties such as group size, time or space is key to an analytical perspective that provides a specific explanation of how relationships and networks matter. The “power of structural properties” with respect to the dynamics of social relationships is illustrated by a qualitative study on changes in personal networks following the loss of the spouse. I close with implications for research into personal networks.