Development and disorders of human infants' and other primates' understanding of other's gaze and facial expression : Reexamination into social referencing

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The main purpose of our research project was to investigate the developmental process and mechanism of infants' gaze- and emotional expression- understanding through focusing upon joint attention and social referencing. In order to attain to that goal, firstly, we reviewed previous studies on human infants' gaze- and emotion expression understandings, including the researches concerning other primates', and discussed those theoretical implications and some unsolved problems. On the basis of such theoretical review, we assumed infants' joint attention and social referencing to be not intra-individual competences but inter-individual or relational phenomena, and planned to explicate caregivers' role in those occurrence and development. As a result, we could partially shed light on the developmental process of social referencing, i.e. from the "involved" style (infants' behavior modulation through their being passively involved in caregivers' emotions), via the "scaffolded" style (infants' behavior modulation through their being scaffolded by caregivers' concerns for infants' attention and intention), to "autonomously referencing" style (infants' behavior modulation through their own autonomously referencing caregivers' emotions). In addition, we observed the daily interactions between infants and their caregivers at their homes, and obtained the results suggesting that caregivers' tendency of mental attribution to a variety of infants' behaviors could influence caregivers' usage of mental-state words, manipulation of infants' attention, and infants' development of gaze understanding including joint attention and social referencing.