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Social referencing is the use of other’s behavior to deal with novel or even threatening situations in order to form one’s own understanding of that certain situation. It develops in children at around the age of 5 ½ - 12 months. There are two components to social referencing. The first is that there is greater reliance on the behaviour of some people then others. The other component is that the more uncertain a situation is, the more social referencing is used. An example of social referencing is the following: a mother walks with her child on the street. A dog appears and the child tends to walk towards the dog. The mother shows sign of fear, when facing the dog. The child is now more likely to also interpret this dog as something fearful and scary and thus will not approach the dog. In contrast, when the mother is not showing any signs of fear, the child will also not show a fearful response, and may even pet the dog. Therefore, social referencing is therefore important for the emotional development of children.

Development of social referencing

Infants in the second part of their first years show clear signs of social referencing when they are confronted to a potentially dangerous stimulus . Social referencing in the end of the first year can be seen as an example of secondary intersubjectivity and an interaction between an infant and mother involving some object.

At the ages of 9-14 months infants begin to show joint attention behaviors which may implicate awareness of others minds. There are rich- and lean interpretations for each of the behaviors adapted. While rich interpretations suggest a predisposition in infants to reference socially, lean interpretations argue that other mechanisms are responsible for the observed behaviors. Joint attention behaviors include gaze following, social referencing, imitation and word learning.

At the age of approximately 12 month infants are used to looking at their parents, when confronted with a new or unusual event. Sometimes they even adjust their behaviors depending on emotional or informational messages that their parents convey. Between 6 month and 2 years children’s tendency to reference parents increases further.

It was found that infants younger than 6 months show precursors of of social referencing, for example gaze following, detection and discrimination of emotional expressions in visual and vocal modulations. These precursors may indicate that social referencing in children emerges earlier than expected. Other preconditions for a child to develop social referencing abilities are that there is equivalence between the self and others and that the infants understands that the mother has an psychological orientation, which is in the case of social referencing an emotional one. This understanding of the emotional psychological orientation is thought to be achieved by the regular exposure to different emotional facial expressions which are paired with positive or negative events in an infants daily life. A study by Mireault et al about social referencing in 6- and- 12-month old infants showed that only 12-months children aligned their behavior towards their parents cues assuming that referencing is broadly defined by looking toward the parent.

Klinnert, Campos, Emde and Svejda (1983) suggested a four-level sequence of development. An infant first learns to discriminate emotional expressions. Then it learns to recognize these expressions. This is followed by emotional responsiveness and finally by the ability of referencing of expressions and behaviors. A study with 6 to 22 month aged children by Tedra A. Walden and Tamra A. Ogan tried to assess if infants actually reference or just imitate their parent’s behavior. While it was apparent that older children actually had the capacity to read facial expressions, younger children lacked such understanding and were more involved in proximity seeking.

A common discussion involves the effect of context on social referencing. Less smiling and more crying are observed in the laboratory than in common environments that are familiar to the child looks directed at parents are sometimes mistaken as reflecting information seeking, while actually the child is searching for proximity due to the novel environment of the laboratory. Nevertheless, the increase of children’s looking at fearful expressions of the parents is thought to reflect a growing ability to use referential information. Supporting this, infant’s looks also become more discriminating in regarding informational aspects of their parent’s behaviors.

Furthermore, various guides about social referencing have shown that infants of 12 months of age show selectivity in looking preference: When placed in an experiment 12 month olds showed a preference for looking at the experimenter rather than to the parent. It is supposed that children must have a capacity to determine which other person in the setting signals more competence. This finding indicates that infants of 12 months of age have already developed a kind of understanding of others intentions and mental states like knowledge.

Auditory and visual referencing

Infants use different emotional cues for social referencing. The most important ones they use for guiding their own behaviour are visual cues (faces) and auditory cues (voices) from people around them.

The visual cliff experiment investigated in the effect of positive visual and vocal cues on infants (12-months old) in potentially dangerous situations. The artificial visual cliff was made of a Plexiglass table. The infant was sitting on one side of the table and the mother stood on the other side next to the table. In the experiment one group of children could see and hear the mother. A second group could only hear the mother and a third group could only see her. Located beneath the part of the table where the infant was sitting was a non-transparent surface whereas the visual cliff between the infant and the mother was transparent. Infants who only saw the mother’s face passed the cliff slower than infants who could only hear the mother’s voice. Moreover, infants who could see and hear their mother passed the cliff in the same time as the infants who only heard their mother’s voice. According to the visual cliff experiment, visual cues are less influential than auditory cues in social referencing. Nevertheless, visual cues are enough for guiding the behaviour in potentially threatening situations.

Further experiments by F.Z. Sai (2005) give a possible reason why auditory cues have a stronger influence than visual cues on social referencing. The experiments investigated the need of new-borns to hear their mother’s voice to be able to recognize her face. Some of the infants heard their mother’s voice, while they saw her face, before. These infants could discriminate their mother’s face from a stranger. The infants who did not hear their mother’s voice in combination with her face before were not able to recognize her. According to this experiment, the infant is already familiar to the mother’s voice from the prenatal time in the womb whereas the new-born is not familiar to the mother’s face. Therefore, auditory cues are more reliable than visual cues for young infants.

The novel toy social referencing paradigm is another study about how sufficient facial or vocal cues are to influence infant’s behaviour. In contrast to the potentially threatening situation in the visual cliff experiment this experiment deals with ambiguous situations. Mothers were either asked to respond happily, neutrally, or fearfully to the toy lying in the room. The half of the participating infants could see their mother’s face whereas the other half could only hear her voice. The infants of the fearful-voice-only group kept more distance to the toy than infants of the neutral- or happy-voice condition. In contrast, a happy voice or all different facial expressions had no influence on the infant’s interaction with the toy. Therefore, the visual cue from the facial expression might be too weak for social referencing in ambiguous situations.

Different aspects of social referencing

Affective social referencing

In affective social referencing infants use the emotional expressions of others in order to determine the situation of an event. If the person the infant is referencing from shows positive affect this has been shown to facilitate positive behaviors towards novel objects, people, situations. In contrast to negative affect that promotes avoidance.

Mood contagion

This can also be related to the Mood contagion hypothesis where infants reflexively adopt the emotional state portrayed by the referencing person. This means that, when for example infants’ mothers show fear or disgust toward an ambiguous object or situation, infants catch the affective tone of the emotion that is being shown and begin to experience that negative emotion themselves. As a result, the infant is less likely to explore the object. When the mother shows pleasure the infant will feel the same way and it will be more likely to approach the novel object or person.

Instrumental social referencing

Instrumental social referencing happens when the Infant uses other people’s actions to determine how to act towards novel objects or people. If the person the infant is referencing from approaches object, the infant is more likely to approach it too and vice versa.

Security of Attachment

In a variation of the Strange Situation procedure by Mary Ainsworth it has been shown that referencing is influenced by the uncertainty of the unfamiliar adult. Infants reference more frequently when the adult arrives and this declines at the end of the experiment. In this unfamiliar setting infants make an effort to stay within the view of the mothers face so that they can judge how to approach the situation. Additionally, the infant will not explore the unknown stranger if the mother is not responsive to the infant. There were also wariations in how every group behaved during the procedure: The Anxious-avoidant, insecure group (A)infants referenced the least frequent of all. This shows their general tendency to ignore the attachment figure. Their mothers generally talked more and used more commands than did other mothers. The Secure (B) group were the securely attached infants that were in between of the other groups. This means that they did not completely ignore their attachment figure but did not reference too much. These infants would thus be likely to reference their mothers when they are faced with uncertainty and this decreases as they become more comfortable with the situation. The Anxious-ambivalent/resistant, insecure (C) group of infants referenced most frequently and their mothers provided more instructions.

Biological factors contributing to social referencing

Social referencing in children with autism

Social referencing poses a difficulty for some children with autism. In general, their ability to orient towards facial expressions and respond to them as well as identifying bodily gestures is impaired. Since these are crucial to the process of social referencing children with autism tend to struggle in this regard.

One reason why social referencing poses a greater issue for atypical children than typical children is that they fail to register as well as observe affective stimuli of others. Therefore, they do not experience reinforcement or extinction contingencies for the affective stimuli. If a person unknown to them were to approach them and their parent, but the child could not identify their parent’s facial expression they would not be able to distinguish between an encouraging stimulus a suppressive stimulus. However, the difference is significant as the first option allows for the child to deem the stranger friendly whereas the latter teaches the child to avoid interaction with the stranger.

Since atypical children are prone to be over stimulated, or experience stimulus over-selectivity, they might search for the wrong cues even if they engage in orienting towards the affective stimuli (i.e. their parent). For autistic children there might be too many stimuli (i.e. facial, verbal communication, hair colour, cloths, environment) that they might orient towards the affective stimuli but react to a stimulus that would not suit the social interaction.

In general, social interaction with parents might not work for children with autism because of their social deficits. If this is the case, the link between the affective stimuli of the parent is not recognized and can therefore not be used to internalize the correct cue for social referencing.

Neurological differences in children with impaired social abilities

Studies have proven a genetic origin of social referencing in children. Research on twin children diagnosed with autism indicate that brain regions that are related to mirror neurons have a significantly thinner cortex then children without social deficiencies. In addition to the thinner MNS region differences where also apparent in areas related to face recognition. Namely the fusiform face area as well as parts of the sensory and motor cortex. Further Scientists discovered changes in cortex that are related to social cognition.

These findings underline the neurological differences that can be causal for social deficiencies such as the inability to utilize social referencing as a child. The genetic component of the interpretation of parental gestures and mimic towards others may have played a crucial role in the survival of the human race and is therefor genetically imprinted in the human DNA.

Transmission of parental psychological disorders through social referencing

Researchers investigated the role of various parental characteristics that may contribute to the development of characteristics in infants and children. Parental conditions such as mental illness and psychopathology, parents who fall under abuse of substances, maternal depression, anxiety, emotional inexpressiveness and avoidant behavior in interactions to infant cues but also the authoritarian parenting style of depressed mothers and the non-contingent responding to the children may all influence the development of infants and children behaviors. In relation to social referencing, infants as young as one year of age demonstrated limited social referencing skills towards their depressed parent´s facial expressions and vocalizations. Thus, the parental condition influences the infants or child response to the social environment.

Social referencing in relation to social phobia

Offspring of mothers with social phobia are themselves at risk for the disorder.These children develop to be progressively more avoidant of social interactions with unfamiliar adults between 10 and 14 months, particularly during stressful periods of stranger-infant interactions. When an infant is in a social environment social referencing, in particular to their mother, plays a big part in how they behave. When their mother shows signs of anxiety and stress in her facial expression and other social cues, the infant is more inclined to behave in a similar way. This is due to the influence of social referencing on their behavior during interaction with strangers. In general, fearful responses can be passed on through intergenerational transmission of social anxiety. Social referencing plays a major part in this transmission because infants generally seek information about their situation and their respond to it, in their parents or other relevant adults. This makes social referencing an important tool, through which children learn behavior in a social environment. If parents repeatedly show anxious or stressful behavior in these social environments, their child notices that behavior and emulates it. Therefore, social phobia can be easily transmitted from generation to generation via social referencing.