The Still-Face Paradigm and Social Referencing in Babies.

The two videos presented on the still-face paradigm and social referencing illustrates a few of the impressive early social abilities of infants. These two phenomena can also be used to study cognitive development in babies by using emotion as an indicator for their cognition. The three main ideas that I could gather from these videos are that babies are much more socially aware than people give them credit for, babies' emotions can change easily just based on the emotions or attention those around them, and that parents have an incredibly strong influence over their child's emotions and actions. With regards to the still-face paradigm, I would recommend that parents give their children lots of attention and affection, and to keep doing whatever silly face or game makes them happy. I would not recommend ignoring the child, or being otherwise emotionally cold, as this causes a great deal of stress in the child. With social referencing, the important message to parents is that their child will look to them when they are unsure of a situation. Knowing this, parents can work to better influence their child's understanding of the world by being cognizant of their own emotions and responses to the same events.