Social Referencing in Adults and Children: Extending Social Appraisal Approaches

Social referencing involves calibrating appraisal against someone else’s emotional orientation to an object or event. This chapter considers some of the individual and relational processes that might be involved in interpersonal and intra-group social referencing episodes involving adults and children. The operation of these processes depends on how emotional information is presented and the kinds of interpersonal contact that are possible. Most of the relevant research has focused specifically on effects of categorical emotions on explicit inference. Extending the range of methods deployed is likely to uncover a broader range of mechanisms including cuing, dynamic entrainment and co-regulatory processes as well as different forms of social appraisal.