The process by which infants seek out and interpret the emotional responses of their parents to form their own emotional understanding of unfamiliar events, objects, or persons.

The concept of social referencing in children has been the subject of increasing study over the last quarter century, as developmental psychologists seek to understand the formation of emotion in infants and children. Research in this area has sought to understand how children learn to respond emotionally to various events, how they learn to interpret the emotional responses of others, and how they form ideas about appropriateness of emotional displays.

Studies have shown that beginning in early infancy, children begin looking at their parents for cues about how to respond to various situations, persons, and stimuli. Researchers have concluded that this kind of social referencing generally occurs in situations of high ambiguity, when infants are presented with novel, startling...