Ehli Samantha, Wolf Julia, Newen Albert, Schneider Silvia, Voigt Babett
Mental Health Research and Treatment Center (MHRTC), Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
Department of Philosophy II, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2020 Dec 15;11:538228. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.538228. eCollection 2020.
In ambiguous situations, infants have the tendency to gather information from a social interaction partner to regulate their behavior [social referencing (SR)]. There are two main competing theories concerning SR's function. According to social-cognitive information-seeking accounts, infants look at social interaction partners to gain information about the ambiguous situation. According to co-regulation accounts, infants look at social interaction partners to receive emotional support. This review provides an overview of the central developments in SR literature in the past years. We focus on the role of situational aspects such as familiarity of SR partners and situational threat, not only for SR (looking), but also for subsequent behavioral regulation (exploration, affect). As the competing accounts make different predictions concerning both contextual factors, this approach may reveal novel insights into the function of SR. Findings showed that a higher familiarity of SR partners consistently resulted in decreased looking (cf. social-cognitive accounts) and that higher threat remains largely understudied, but seemed to increase looking in the first few studies (cf. co-regulation accounts). Concerning behavioral regulation (exploration, affect) findings are mixed. We point out that moving toward a more complex situatedness may help to disentangle the heterogeneous results by considering the interaction between familiarity and threat rather than investigating the factors in isolation. From a general perspective, this review underlines the importance of situational factors and their interaction in eliciting a phenomenon, such as SR, but also in determining the nature of the phenomenon itself.
在模棱两可的情境中，婴儿倾向于从社会互动伙伴那里收集信息来调节自己的行为[社会参照（SR）]。关于社会参照的功能，有两种主要的相互竞争的理论。根据社会认知信息寻求理论，婴儿看向社会互动伙伴以获取有关模棱两可情境的信息。根据共同调节理论，婴儿看向社会互动伙伴以获得情感支持。本综述概述了过去几年社会参照文献的主要进展。我们关注情境因素的作用，如社会参照伙伴的熟悉程度和情境威胁，这不仅对于社会参照（注视），而且对于随后的行为调节（探索、情感）都有影响。由于这两种相互竞争的理论对这两个情境因素的预测不同，这种方法可能会揭示有关社会参照功能的新见解。研究结果表明，社会参照伙伴的熟悉程度越高，注视行为持续减少（参照社会认知理论），而较高的威胁在很大程度上仍未得到充分研究，但在最初的一些研究中似乎会增加注视行为（参照共同调节理论）。关于行为调节（探索、情感）的研究结果则喜忧参半。我们指出，朝着更复杂的情境发展可能有助于通过考虑熟悉程度和威胁之间的相互作用，而不是孤立地研究这些因素，来理清这些异质的结果。从总体角度来看，本综述强调了情境因素及其相互作用在引发诸如社会参照这样的现象中的重要性，同时也强调了其在确定现象本身性质方面的重要性。
