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Social Referencing refers to the psychological process of observing emotional cues in order to establish appropriate actions for a situation. Infants aquire knowledge of their parents' affectional display and adjust their behaviour accordingly. This includes behaviour towards people as well as objects, animals or other situations, which enables the child to make sense of the world around them. Young infants assess their thought process and expressions as well as their behaviour by comparing them to other people to gain insight into socially approved responses and socially disapproved responses. This type of social learning is part of the developmental process of children and is subject to change over time. While babies exercise social referencing from a very young age, they become increasingly aware that some parts of the human body are more likely to give away useful information. Babies that are 14- to 22-month old pay greater attention to their parent's face, which they deem the best source of Information. Infants then also tend to seek parental approval before acting, because they learn that acting first and seeking approval later can lead to more trouble. Children's process of social referencing highlights the importance of social and emotional interactions for the regulation of their social behaviour.

History
Although some research already showed that children use their caregivers as a base to explore the environment around them and that researchers assumed they would use them as a relevant source of information, social referencing has first been studied in adults at the beginning of the 1950s and it has been touched upon in children only in the 1980s.

The concept of reference group is central to Feinman's (1982) definition of social referencing. A reference group is a group of people with whom an individual can compare his attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. On the other hand, Campos and his colleagues limit the term social referencing to those situations in which an infant actively seeks an adult's emotional expression. To help interpret a situation.

Experiments
Since the early beginnings of the concept of social referencing, researchers continuously conducted experiments to prove and extend the understanding of this psychological process. Many of these experiments have been visual cliff experiments. In this experiments there is an apparatus known as the visual cliff that consists of a sheet of plexiglass, on which the infant or toddler can crawl. The set-up is divided into two different halves by a platform in the middle. On one half there is a checked pattern right beneath the glass. Therefore, this side looks like a normal safe surface, where the participant can crawl and sit. On the other side, the same checked pattern is far under the sheet of Plexiglas. Because of the contrast between the different sides it looks as if there is a drop-off after the platform in the middle. This set-up was first use by Elenor Gibson and Richard Walk in 1960 to study depth perception in infants. They found out that 6- to 14-month old infants would cross the half, where the pattern is right under the plexiglass, but the infants would not cross the other side after the drop-off. They used this finding as evidence that infants perceived depth by using the depth cue of relative size. In general, the experiment can be used to show the interdependence of different domains in the development of an infant and has been used often since its first use. The experimental setting has been used to demonstrate a connection between depth perception, locomotion, cognitive abilities, emotion and social context of development. In 2004 Vaish and Striano performed a visual cliff experiment to extend the concept of social referencing by giving evidence to suggest that vocal cues are more effective than giving facial cues alone. However, social referencing seems to be best when both vocal and facial cues are present. In order to test this idea they assigned participants equally to either condition (1) face plus voice, (2) face only or (3) voice only. The duration of the infants to cross the cliff and the duration of the infants to look towards their mother's head were measured.

Another experiment, conducted by Herrnstein and Campos, gave rise to the idea that once children are 14 months old, the emotion related information conveyed by social referencing influences the child's touching of an object up to an hour later. Herrnstein and Campos tested 11-month old children against 14-month-old children in a social referencing paradigm. Between an exposure trial and a test trial was a delay of one hour. In contrast to younger children, the 14-month-olds showed regulatory effects during the test trial. For the 11 months old children this was only the case if the period between exposure and test trial was briefer.

Influence on the child's early development
Aarohi Achwal stated that social referencing does impact the child's development. Not only does the child learn from their parents what different expressions mean, but also which contexts are relevant for certain emotions. Social referencing serves as a basis for advanced thinking, understanding connotations and how to make decisions. Proposed on how parents can act to influence this development, is that a wide variety of facial expressions in the interaction with the child help, and that emotion and behaviour are synchronized. Another useful effect of social referencing is that parents can show their child what healthy eating habits are through emotive expression. Just as happy emotions are important to imprint on a child, it is suggested to also express sadness and pain. Regardless of the positive aspects, it is thought that infants do have the needed perceptual and cognitive capacities to comprehend what their parents emotionally express, but it is not clear if they use it to do so. Additionally, Gale Zivin stated that infants may not always correctly identify what is being expressed by the person expressing the emotion.

Children with autism spectrum disorder
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have limited or non-existent social referencing repertoires. Some children with ASD do not engage in social referencing or display difficulties with it.

Among children with ASD, there is a lack of spontaneous gazing behaviours and potentially differentiated responses to affective signals. For example children who are diagnosed with ASD can have trouble reacting to nonverbal affective behaviour such as facial expression and bodily gestures, orienting towards facial emotions during social interactions and mimicking facial emotions. The incapacity of children with ASD to orient toward or detect social stimuli may be one of the factors leading to difficulties with social referencing.

Young children can learn about environmental events and regulate their own behaviour by watching others' emotional or affective responses.