Processes of Social Referencing

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Infants and young children are active information processors and they seek information that they can use in deciding how to behave in a variety of situations, particularly those that are novel or stressful. One source of information to which even young children learn to pay attention is the behavior of other people, particularly emotional reactions to events as they occur. That is, other people's reactions are an important source of information about hazards and opportunities in the world. By the end of the first year of life infants notice and base their behavior partly on reactions communicated to them by other people. This series of studies will investigate processes of social referencing and their development in infants and young children. Social referencing refers to the use of another's interpretation of an event as basis for forming one's own interpretation of the meaning of that event and as a basis for subsequent responses to that event. Specifically, this program of research will follow-up findings obtained in my previous work which indicated that some children did not show behavior regulation in response to parental affective communications; and that this effect was associated with parental contingency, an issue in the timing of information. The effect of contingency is proposed to operate via infant attention, with noncontingent messages occurring in nonoptimal state of attention with regard to linking the message with the intended referent. Projects will 1) investigate the development of infant attention and link social referencing outcomes with messages received in optimal and nonoptimal state of attention, 2) experimentally manipulate the occurrence of parental messages to occur in optimal and nonoptimal state of attention, and 3) investigate the contribution of infant affect prior to and during receipt of parental messages to social referencing outcomes. These projects will contribute to our understanding of processes that underlie social referencing and facilitate or inhibit the transmission of social influence the transmission of social influence from one person to another. Thus, they will add to our knowledge of how this significant form of social information is communicated to and used by very young children in dealing with events.