2014年5月托福考试模拟试题及答案(第十套)_第4页

　　Social Referencing

　　Scocial referencing is a process in which infants seek out and interpret the emotional responses from their parents to form their own emotional understanding of unfamiliar events, objects, or people. The concept of social referencing in children has been the subject of increasing studies over the last quarter of a century, as developmental psychologists seek to understand the formation of emotion in infants and children. Researches in this area have sought to understand how children learn to respond emotionally to various events, how they learn to interpret emotional responses of others, and how they form ideas about appropriateness if emotional displays.

　　Sample Answer:

　　Social referencing refers to a progress in which babies interpret the parents’ emotional responses to form their own understanding of unfamiliar objects. The lecture introduces two experiments to illustrate the term. The first experiment was conducted among 20 six-minth-old infants. They were separated into two groups and were asked to play dolls. The first group’s mothers smiled to the m while mothers of the second group put on an angry face. No diffiences were found between these two groups. Then, the same experiment was conducted among 20 one-year-old babies. The findings show that babies of smiling mothers continued to play and the rest babies stopped playing. This indicates that infants older than 1 year would take action according to social referencing.