This year SAS announced the winner of its inaugural Best Paper in Affective Science award, co-sponsored by SAS and the journal Affective Science. Access the paper here! Full citation: Nencheva, M. L., Nook, E. C., Thornton, M. A., Lew-Williams, C., & Tamir, D. I. (2024). The emergence of organized emotion dynamics in childhood. Affective Science, 5, 246–258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-024-00248-y This paper is at the nexus of affective, cognitive, linguistic, and developmental perspectives, with unique contributions in approaching affective science through a developmental lens. Using a multi-method approach, the research team studied over 900 caregivers of young children across five studies. First author Mira L. Nencheva, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, describes the key findings and impact of this work: “Our study shows that while young infants move between emotions in more idiosyncratic and abrupt ways (e.g., from happy to fussy, and back again) compared to adults, over the first five years of life, they gradually converge on a shared adult-like pattern of emotion transitions. These findings highlight that studying emotions as they unfold moment by moment can deepen our understanding of how emotional development takes shape across years. This project embodies the interdisciplinary spirit of SAS. It brought together collaborators from social psychology and cognitive development who had not worked together previously to develop creative new ways of studying emotion development inspired by their diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds.”