Carolyn Ingrid Saarni (May 13, 1945 – June 5, 2015) was a developmental psychologist known for groundbreaking research on children's development of emotional competence and emotional self-regulation, and the role of parental influence in emotional socialization. She was a professor in the Department of Counseling at Sonoma State University from 1980 to 2013. Saarni worked with Michael Lewis in editing a landmark book titled The Socialization of Emotions, which guided research on the development of emotions for decades. She subsequently authored The Development of Emotional Competence, which outlined a theory of emotional competence encompassing eight different skills: awareness of one's own emotion, awareness of others' emotions, ability to use emotional vocabulary, capacity for empathy, ability to cope with stressful situations, emotional communication within relationships, and emotional self-efficacy. Biography Saarni was born in Berkeley, California. She attended Berkeley public schools and received her B.A in 1967 from the University of California, Berkeley followed by a MA in 1969, and a Ph.D. in educational psychology in 1971 from the same institution. As a graduate student, Saarni studied cognitive development and its implications for education, with her dissertation titled "Piagetian Operations and Field Independence as Factors in Children’s Problem-Solving Performance". Saarni taught in the Department of Educational Psychology at New York University from 1971 to 1979. While living in New York, Saarni completed a two-year post-doctoral training program in clinical psychology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Rational-Emotive Therapy and began studying emotion as a communicative and expressive psychological phenomenon. Saarni moved back to Berkeley in 1980 to join the faculty of Counseling Psychology at Sonoma State University where she remained throughout her career. In addition to her faculty position, Saarni had a clinical practice in mental health. Research Saarni's research on development of emotion understanding and competence was influenced by her clinical expertise and practice. Saarni explored emotion communication in families, starting with attachment relationships that infants develop with their caregivers and examining ways that parents influence their children's emotional development over time. In Saarni's view, emotional competence is developed through environmental influences, which may include growing up in a supportive family where the child can experience a diversity of emotions in a secure space. Rather than being innate, Saarni believed that emotional competence is nurtured and developed through the child's interactions with others, especially family members and peers. Saarni also explored sociocultural factors that influence how people express emotions, how