Children’s emotions were long thought to be an important part of child development and in need of detailed study. Interest waned as investigators realized that neither theories nor research were sufficiently reliable to reach definite conclusions. In the last decade, however, enthusiasm about emotions and their development has returned and sparked renewed studies and speculation. Current views of emotions consider not only the brain’s role in emotional development, but also the contributions of body and the environment. As psychiatrist Joseph Ratey (2001) notes, emotion is messy, complicated, primitive, and undefined because it is all over the place, intertwined with cognition and physiology.