Social referencing: The infant's use of emotional signals from a friendly adult with mother present.

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that 1 -year-old infants look toward their mothers' facial expressions and use the emotional information conveyed. In this study, 46 1-year-olds were confronted with an unusual toy in a context where an experimenter familiar to the infants posed either happy or fearful expressions and where their mothers were present but did not provide facial signals. Most of the infants (83%) referenced the familiarized stranger. Once the adult's facial signals were noted, the infant's instrumental behaviors and expressive responses to the toy were influenced in the direction of the affective valence of the adult's expression. The results indicate that infants may be influenced by the emotional expressions of a much broader group of adults than has previously been recognized. In this study we investigated whether infants would reference an adult other than their mothers and would make use of the affective information obtained. Emotional expressions of others provide important information about environmental events. Recent studies have shown that preverbal infants engage in referencing—they look to others when confronted with a variety of events and use the emotional reactions of others to regulate their own behavior. The infants' mothers provided the emotional signals in these studies, by giving either prototypical facial expressions (Klinnert, 1984; Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985) or vocal signals (Svejda & Campos, in press) or by controlling the positive affect in multichannele d responses (Feinman & Lewis, 1983). Although the purpose of these initial studies was to demonstrate that infant behavior is responsive to a social signaling process, the studies also reflect a basic assumption about infants' social referencing: If an infant is responsive to anyone's affective signals, the person most likely to influence the infant is his or her mother. The central role of mothers in infants' social was initially suggested by Campos and Stenberg (1981), who postulated that mother becomes the target of social referencing (p. 295). In fact, the term maternal was sometimes used interchangeably with the term social referenc