A Critical Review of Social Referencing in Infancy

Feinman, Saul; Roberts, Debra; Hsieh, Kelly; Sawyer, Darby; Swanson, Dee

doi:10.1007/978-1-4899-2462-9_2

Cited by 147 publications

(193 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Campos and colleagues (2000;Campos, Hiatt, Ramsay, Henderson, & Svejda, 1978;Campos, Kermoian, & Zumbahlen, 1992) report that the onset of locomotion is accompanied by an increased interest in distal objects or people as well as an increased "checking back" with caregivers. This checking back is part of social referencing whereby, when infants around 1 year of age encounter new or ambiguous situations, they use others' perceptions and interpretations of the events to form their own interpretations of those events (Campos & Stenberg, 1981;Feinman, 1982; but see Baldwin & Moses, 1996). The ability to gather and receive information about novel or ambiguous events allows infants to vicariously learn about environmental stimuli (Campos & Stenberg, 1981).…”

Section: A Evidence From Social Referencingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

942

615

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There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never seriously been considered. Here, we argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development, evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. We discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias, and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, we suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and we make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development. KeywordsNegativity bias; Affective asymmetry; Social-cognitive development; Emotion; Social referencing Infants are exposed to a great deal of social information from birth, and their ability to use this information effectively is critical for development in many domains and for survival in general. This raises several important questions: do infants attend equally to all facets of this information, or do they attend to certain facets more than others? Do they, in addition, learn and remember particular kinds of information better than others? What evolutionary and developmental consequences do these ways of approaching the environment have? In this paper, we propose that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. We propose possible ontogenetic pathways for the emergence of the negativity bias, and we argue that this bias serves important evolutionary and developmental functions.

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Section: A Evidence From Social Referencingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

942

615

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Observational conditioning or social referencing may also be particularly relevant for understanding habituation in the sense that they involve the ability to attribute another's behavioural response to an external event (Feinman et al 1992 Although examples of observational conditioning or social referencing in the wild are scarce, captive studies have revealed the relevance and importance of these mechanisms during the developmental stages of nonhuman primates. For example, in a classic study, Mineka et al ( 1984 ) demonstrated that naïve captive rhesus monkeys showed no initial fear of snakes, but quickly learned to fear them by observing the responses of their (wild-born) parents.…”

Section: Habituation As Social Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Socially learned habituation to human observers in wild chimpanzees

et al. 2014

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Habituation to human observers is an essential tool in animal behaviour research. Habituation occurs when repeated and inconsequential exposure to a human observer gradually reduces an animal's natural aversive response. Despite the importance of habituation, little is known about the psychological mechanisms facilitating it in wild animals. Although animal learning theory offers some account, the patterns are more complex in natural than in laboratory settings, especially in large social groups in which individual experiences vary and individuals influence each other. Here, we investigate the role of social learning during the

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“…In addition to their instrumental communicative goals, humans are also motivated to share experiences about events and things in the environment with their significant others and to become "swept along" by them (Feinman, 1982;Striano and Rochat, 1999;Tomasello, 1999;Hobson and Hobson, 2008;Rochat et al, 2009). This motivation has even been regarded as the force that has driven the evolution of language (Locke, 1996(Locke, , 2002Dunbar, 1997).…”

Section: Sequentiality and Concurrency In Human Social Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Holler

Kendrick

Casillas

et al. 2016

Frontiers Research Topics

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The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields

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A Critical Review of Social Referencing in Infancy

Cited by 147 publications

References 30 publications

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Socially learned habituation to human observers in wild chimpanzees

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

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