Social Referencing

What it is

It is studied most in infants and caregivers: faced with a new toy or a stranger, a child checks a parent's face and adjusts. Vaish, Grossmann and Woodward treat infant social referencing as the clearest evidence that the negativity bias appears early in development, because a fearful or disapproving reaction tends to shape the child's response more than a happy one.

In effect

In the article on negativity bias, it shows the bias at work before language, in how a child reads a caregiver's face.

What it does not say

It describes using another person's reaction as information. It does not say that infants ignore positive signals, and the review treats the early bias as a proposal with predictions still to test.

---