Section of Psychology, Department of Biomedical Sciences and Technologies, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.
PLoS One. 2012;7(10):e47653. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047653. Epub 2012 Oct 11.
Social referencing is a process whereby an individual uses the emotional information provided by an informant about a novel object/stimulus to guide his/her own future behaviour towards it. In this study adult dogs were tested in a social referencing paradigm involving a potentially scary object with either their owner or a stranger acting as the informant and delivering either a positive or negative emotional message. The aim was to evaluate the influence of the informant's identity on the dogs' referential looking behaviour and behavioural regulation when the message was delivered using only vocal and facial emotional expressions. Results show that most dogs looked referentially at the informant, regardless of his/her identity. Furthermore, when the owner acted as the informant dogs that received a positive emotional message changed their behaviour, looking at him/her more often and spending more time approaching the object and close to it; conversely, dogs that were given a negative message took longer to approach the object and to interact with it. Fewer differences in the dog's behaviour emerged when the informant was the stranger, suggesting that the dog-informant relationship may influence the dog's behavioural regulation. Results are discussed in relation to studies on human-dog communication, attachment, mood modification and joint attention.
社会参照是指个体利用信息提供者提供的关于新奇物体/刺激的情绪信息来指导自己对其未来的行为。在这项研究中，成年狗在一种社会参照范式中接受测试，涉及一个潜在的可怕物体，其主人或陌生人作为信息提供者，传递积极或消极的情绪信息。目的是评估信息提供者的身份对狗的参照性观察行为和行为调节的影响，当只使用声音和面部情绪表达传递信息时。结果表明，大多数狗都对信息提供者进行了参照性观察，而不论其身份如何。此外，当主人作为信息提供者时，收到积极情绪信息的狗改变了它们的行为，更频繁地观察他/她，并花更多的时间接近物体并靠近它；相反，收到负面信息的狗则需要更长的时间来接近物体并与它互动。当信息提供者是陌生人时，狗的行为差异较小，这表明狗-信息提供者关系可能会影响狗的行为调节。研究结果与人类-狗交流、依恋、情绪调节和共同关注的研究有关。
