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Down Syndrome and Williams Syndrome
The socially guided form of learning, referred to as social referencing, is critical for the development of children’s understanding of other people and their environment. Research by John (2011) indicates that the onset of the social referencing process is delayed in children with developmental delays or neurodevelopmental disorders such as Down Syndrome or Williams Syndrome.

For children with Down Syndrome, it is particularly difficult to comprehend visual, auditory and other sensory information at a high speed. They also display slow reaction times and a low degree of spontaneous activity, increasing the need for extra encouragement when learning or exploring. Research by Knieps et al. (1994) reports that children with developmental delays do not show evidence of using social referencing to regulate their behavior. Although these children look at their parents in situations that ordinarily elicit social referencing, affective parental communications about ambiguous events did not influence their behavior. In their study, Knieps et al. (1994) observed that infants with Down Syndrome did not match their parents positive expressions and expressed affect opposite to their parent's fearful expression. The affective expressions of infants with Down Syndrome were influenced by parental affect; however, the expressions were incongruent. They express more positivity than negativity following a fearful message provided by the referent. This supports the suggestion that children with Down Syndrome have specific deficits in the capacity to process emotional information.

Individuals with Williams Syndrome typically demonstrate an overly friendly, affectionate and socially disinhibited personality. Furthermore, they also exhibit a short attention span, extra sensitivity to sounds and anxiety - especially about upcoming events. Toddlers with Williams Syndrome show atypically focused attention to an experimenters face during cognitive tasks. In a study by John (2011), children with Williams Syndrome were unable to locate an intended target even when a communicative eye-gaze gesture was added. They follow an adult's pointing gesture less often than typically developed children. Individuals with WS also evidence difficulty matching and labeling emotional expressions. They are significantly less accurate at identifying both facial and vocal expressions of fear. Their findings provide the indication that children with Williams Syndrome have difficulty comprehending the communicative significance of another person's fearful reactions. They would approach a stimulus in the Social Referencing task and formed a positive opinion of it, despite the experimenter's fearful response.

Autism
Children display social referencing skills during the period of 9-12 months in normal development. Unfortunately, individuals with autism have trouble approaching social referencing (Feinman, 1982; Klinnert, Campos, Sorce, Emde, & Svejda, 1983; Moor & Corkum, 1994). Sigman, Arbelle, & Dissanayake (1995) suggested that social referencing is absent from autistic children. Bacon et al. (1998) reported that preschoolers with autism were less likely to employ social referencing. In the presence of ambiguous and unfamiliar stimuli, these autistic children did not attempt to seek for the information from adults. Another study that investigated 18-month-old siblings of children with autism indicated that deficit in social referencing may be considered as an early signal to predict autism (Cornew et al., 2012). In the experiment, Cornew found that autistic infants took longer time to start seeking for vocalization and facial expression than their siblings without autism and typical developing children. In addition, infants whose siblings developed autism did not advance emotional information from adults to regulate their behaviors regardless of later autism diagnosis. It suggested that this impairment of social referencing may represent an endophenotype for autism disorder.

However, many studies which used behavioral procedures to teach social referencing skills to autistic children suggested that individuals with autism can attain some social referencing skills after training (Gena, Krantz, McClannahan, and Poulson, 1996). In the study about training and generalization of affective behavior, adolescents with autism received treatment including modeling, verbal prompting, and reinforcement. After the training, contextually appropriate affective responding increased and treatment effects were generalized across untrained scenarios, therapists, time, and settings. In another study by Buffington, Krantz, McClannahan, and Poulson (1998), four autistic children were taught to use contextually appropriate gestures across three response categories: attention directing/getting behavior, affective behavior, and descriptive behavior. After participating in the study, children can respond in novel settings, show more socially appropriate behavior, and have the same social interaction as their peers did.

Moreover, although children with autism may suffer deficit in development of social referencing, they possibly develop social referencing skills later in life. In other words, autistic children achieve social skills later than typical developing children. Warreyn et al. (2005) conducted a study to examine social referencing in autistic children from 3 to 6 years old, these children did not show social referencing deficit. Nevertheless, compared to typically developing children, individuals with autism experienced a delay in social communicative development because 5-year-old children without autism did not show social referencing in the experimental tasks. An explanation is that the children with autism may function on the level of younger children. This study also suggests that future research should approach social referencing in younger children to clarify the delay in social communicative development of autistic children.