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Social Referencing

Social referencing is the ability to use others' expressions and actions, like facial miens or vocal tone, to gather additional information about the environment. It enables us to act in an appropriate manner in many different situations. An individual is more likely to use social referencing in an ambiguous situation. This ability develops early in infancy and is used throughout the lifetime. It's not only found in humans, but also in animals.

Development in infants and children

The skill of social referencing already starts developing in infancy and becomes more fine-tuned over time. It plays an important role in general communication and especially in mother-infant interactions.

However, psychologists generally assume that the ability to visually reference the mother and to respond accordingly has already developed at 12 months.

Nevertheless, existing studies show that under specific conditions (for example: the involvement of a stranger in the experimental situation) children already show effects of social referencing at 10 months of age.

Even in infants between 6 and 9 months signs of an early stage of social referencing have occurred. In an experiment where parents expressed fear regarding a toy infants did not spend as much time playing with this specific toy as with others. Although children have not yet grasped the concept of social referencing fully, this behavior demonstrates a delayed effect of the communication between parent and child. Under similar conditions children between 10 and 13 months could respond to their parents' reaction by avoiding the specific toy and thus already have an understanding of social referencing. Children between 14 and 22 months have a preference to look at their parents´ faces, which provide an important source of information about their reaction towards the environment. Therefore they are able to use social referencing to interpret their environment.

As one can see it is difficult to assign a specific age to the development of social referencing. This is due to the fact that every infant progresses differently and studies investigating this topic use different approaches to acquire data.

Adults

Social referencing appears whenever we are faced with ambiguities in the environment. Such ambiguities exist throughout the lifetime and therefore social referencing can manifest itself at any age and does not occur in infants’ behaviour only. Although it has a shared function for both, infant and adult, social referencing may take distinctive forms, as it depends on more basic and rudimentary principles in infants’ behaviour and allows more complex navigation in adults. For instance, children are more likely to directly look at the social partner’s face to gain information about its environment, while adults are more likely to observe in a subtler manner.

Bystander effect

The bystander effect can demonstrate the power of social referencing in terms of social influence in an emergency situation was given by Latané and Darley in 1968. The findings demonstrated that participants were less likely to intervene in emergency situations in the presence of confederates that seemed unconcerned. This behaviour is called the bystander effect. This shows that when individuals are faced with a conflicting or ambiguous event, they are more likely to seek approval in social partners to interpret the context of a situation.

Brain regions

Brain regions which are the major components in social cognition, such as social referencing, are the amygdala, the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporal cortex. These brain regions are mainly involved in having a theory of mind and then predicting others' mental states. Because to be able to use other mental states and to refer to ones own situation, one needs to be able to understand that others also have desires, beliefs, and intentions.

To use the information given by other’s as a reference, one needs the ability of perspective taking, knowing that this person has a different view of the world. The temporal-parietal junction showed increased activity when representing perspective differences. The superior temporal sulcus showed similar activity. This brain region is responsible for perceiving others' eye-gaze to know where their attention is directed to. Also, it aids to interpret others' emotions towards an object and to aplly this new information towards one's own context.

The amygdala plays a critical role in facial recognition of emotions. Patients with lesions to the bilateral amygdala showed impaired ability to recognise fearful or happy facial expressions which are important cues in social interactions.

Psychological disorders

Autism spectrum disorders

Autism spectrum disorders is a psychological disorder, that includes challenges in the core domains of social life, communication, and controlled behaviour.

1. Impairment of social interactions: mostly problems to establish relationships and share interest.
2. Impairment in communication: mostly nonverbal communication (eye contact, facial expressions, or posture).
3. Impairment in controlled behavior and imaginary thought: mostly constant fixation on objects and repeated body movement.

The ability to use social referencing is limited or completely lacking in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Even though autistic people can perceive different movements or facial expressions, it is hard for them to link those to different emotions. This lack of recognizing others' emotion in response to an object or a situation makes it very difficult, even impossible, to use social referencing.

In different studies it was shown, that it is possible to teach children with autism to use social referencing through learning the response, in combination with the stimulation of the reward system.

Down syndrome

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by a fully or partly developed third chromosome 21. It is associated with dysmorphic facial features, delayed physical growth and moderate intellectual disability, often characterised by learning difficulties. In general Down syndrome is connected with a slowed down development of especially mental capacities.

Individuals with Down Syndrome have relative strength in social abilities, such as communication and show social behavior. They seem to be impaired in interpreting facial expressions, if they are negative. For positive facial expressions they are able to detect and interpret them easier.

Studies that compared children with Williams syndrome and children with Down syndrome showed that the latter are better able to initiate and follow joint attention. Researchers suggest that joint attention abilities are important factors for social learning as well as lay the foundation for the later development of theory of mind.

Most people with Down syndrome have the ability to use social referencing, although it develops later than normal.

Social referencing in animals

Social referencing is not only found in humans, but also in non-human primates and even in domesticated cats and dogs, although research on this is limited. There are many similarities between human and non-human primates when looking at social, emotional and cognitive skills, which makes it feasible to think that social referencing is used by both of them to learn about their environments. Regarding cats and dogs, it is possible that they can differentiate between happy and fearful messages made by their owners, since they have lived with humans for many years and established a social bond with them.

Chimpanzees

According to a study by Adamson and collegues on young chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), they are able to acquire information about their environments through social referencing. In this study, chimpanzees nursed by humans were used, since chimpanzee mothers would not cooperate in the standardized procedure of sending different emotional messages. An example would be a prior study by Itakura, where they used chimpanzees together with their mother, which resulted in the infants seeking more contact of their mother in the presence of a novel object than in their absence. But since the mother did not send different emotional messages, they could not conclude the occurrence of social referencing.

Going back to the aforementioned study, they used two conditions; one in which the caregiver expressed happy emotions about a novel object, and the other in which fearful emotions were expressed by the caregiver. The expression commonly consisted of verbal, as well as facial expressions in combination with tone of voice. All of the young chimpanzees looked at the object, checked the caregiver’s expression, and looked back again at the object at least once. The young chimpanzees backed up from the object more often when a fearful expression was used, and looked longer at the object when a happy expression was given by their caregiver, probably because the young chimpanzee had evaluated the object in a more positive matter in that situation. As already mentioned, they could conclude that the chimpanzees are able to acquire information about their environment through social referencing, and they were also influenced in their behaviour by this information. To compare it with human infants; the frequency of looking at the caregiver is in both the chimpanzee as well as the human infants similar , and it increases in both of them with age.

Dogs

This standardized procedure, involving emotional messages given by the caregiver towards a novel object, was also used with dogs, or Canis familiaris. Here, most dogs looked at the caregiver, after looking at the novel object. This suggests that they look for additional information when they are exposed to a novel object. Supporting this conclusion, the dogs that reacted non-confidential towards the object, showed significantly more referential looking than the confident dogs. These results can be compared with human-raised chimpanzees; both dogs and human-reared chimpanzees are able to form a strong bond with a human caregiver, which plays a role of a secure base when exposed to a new and potentially stressful situation. Additionally, the inhibition of movement after given a negative emotional message to the dogs, is also found in human babies.

A study on whether dogs can interpret a social referencing cue, either a happy or fearful message, toward an object was conducted by Min Hooi Yong and Ted Ruffman. According to them, it is uncertain whether dogs really understand the happy and fearful messages. Dogs could just become confused by the fearful message and then avoid exploring the environment and thus the object.

Cats

The same procedure was used on cats (Felis catus). Most of the cats showed referential looking behaviour towards their human caregivers, and also changed their behaviour in line with the emotional message when exposed to a novel object. Cats, just as dogs, have fully adapted to the human social environment and are capable of establishing social bonds with humans. In contrast to dogs and infants, cats showed a tendency to move earlier when given a fearful message, instead of being static. This could be explained by the fact that cats are not only a predator like dogs, but also a prey species, which have a tendency to make a flight response when exposed to a fearful situation.