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

本研究的主要目的是通过关注共同注意和社会参照来探讨婴儿凝视和情绪表达理解的发展过程和机制。为了实现这一目标，我们首先回顾了前人对人类婴儿凝视和情感表达理解的研究，包括对其他灵长类动物的研究，并讨论了这些研究的理论意义和一些尚未解决的问题。在此理论回顾的基础上，我们假设婴儿的共同注意和社会参照不是个体内部的能力，而是个体间或关系现象，并计划阐明照顾者在其发生和发展中的作用。因此，我们可以部分地揭示社会参照的发展过程，即从“参与”型（婴儿通过被动参与照顾者的情绪而进行行为调节）到“脚手架”型（婴儿通过被照顾者对婴儿的注意和意向的关注而进行行为调节）。到“自主参照”风格（婴儿通过自己自主参照照顾者的情绪来调节行为）。此外，我们还观察了婴儿与照顾者在家中的日常互动，结果表明照顾者对婴儿各种行为的心理归因倾向会影响照顾者对心理状态词的使用、对婴儿注意力的操纵以及婴儿共同注意和社会参照等凝视理解的发展。

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.