Evidence for Referential Understanding in the Emotions Domain at Twelve and Eighteen Months

Infants as young as 12 months readily modulate their behavior toward novel, ambiguous objects based on emotional responses that others display. Such social-referencing skill offers powerful benefits to infants' knowledge acquisition, but the magnitude of these benefits depends on whether they a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2001-05, Vol.72 (3), p.718-735
Main Authors: Moses, Louis J., Baldwin, Dare A., Rosicky, Julie G., Tidball, Glynnis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age groups
Attention
Babies
Behavior
Biobehavioral Development, Perception, and Action
Biological and medical sciences
Child development
Child psychology
Children
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Development
Cues
Developmental psychology
Disgust
Emotional Development
Emotional expression
Emotions
Experimentation
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human behaviour
Humans
Imitative Behavior
Infant
Infants
Internal-External Control
Male
Newborn. Infant
Personality
Pleasure
Psychology
Psychology, Child
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Referential Communication
Social Behavior
Social Cognition
Social Perception
Social reasoning
Social Referencing
Toys
Visual fixation
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Summary:Infants as young as 12 months readily modulate their behavior toward novel, ambiguous objects based on emotional responses that others display. Such social-referencing skill offers powerful benefits to infants' knowledge acquisition, but the magnitude of these benefits depends on whether they appreciate the referential quality of others' emotional messages, and are skilled at using cues to reference (e. g., gaze direction, body posture) to guide their interpretation of such messages. Two studies demonstrated referential understanding in 12- and 18-month-olds' responses to another's emotional outburst. Infants relied on the presence versus absence of referential cues to determine whether an emotional message should be linked with a salient, novel object in the first study (N = 48), and they actively consulted referential cues to disambiguate the intended target of an affective display in the second study (N = 32). These findings provide the first experimental evidence of such sophisticated referential abilities in 12-month-olds, as well as the first evidence that infant social referencing at any age actually trades on referential understanding.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/1467-8624.00311