乳幼児期における社会的参照の発達的意味およびその発達プロセスに関する理論的検討

Abstract

When faced with the unknown or ambiguous, human beings tend to unconsciously consult others for guidance; they took to facial expressions or listen to vocal tones of others. Utilization of others as information sources, social referencing has been paid a lot of attention in developmental psychology, and its origin and development have been actively investigated and discussed. Nevertheless, there appear to be few integrated or comprehensive views on the developmental meanings and processes of social referencing in infancy. This paper reviews and evaluates various theoretical and empirical studies on early social referencing, and attempts to integrate them. Specifically, we first define social referencing and describe experimental paradigms to study infant social referencing. We next discuss its developmental function of effective learning facilitation and its requisites, such as understanding affect specificity and referential quality of information. We then consider some important problems in ontogeny of social referencing, in relation to theory of mind, attachment, and so on. And finally, we point out some unanswered questions and propose a new perspective for social referencing in daily situations.