Social referencing is a process whereby an individual uses the emotional information provided by an informant about a novel object/stimulus to guide his/her own future behaviour towards it. In this study adult dogs were tested in a social referencing paradigm involving a potentially scary object with either their owner or a stranger acting as the informant and delivering either a positive or ne...

BACKGROUND This study examines whether different sources of cognitive complaint (i.e., self and informant) predict Alzheimer's disease (AD) neuropathology in elders with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). METHODS Data were drawn from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center Uniform and Neuropathology Datasets (observational studies) for participants with a clinical diagnosis of MCI and post...

OBJECTIVE Self-reports of personality provide valid information about personality disorders (PDs). However, informant reports provide information about PDs that self-reports alone do not provide. The current article examines whether and when one perspective is more valid than the other in identifying PDs. METHOD Using a representative sample of adults 55 to 65 years of age (N = 991; 45% males...

Social animals frequently rely on information from other individuals. This can be costly in case the other individual is mistaken or even deceptive. Human infants below 4 years of age show proficiency in their reliance on differently reliable informants. They can infer the reliability of an informant from few interactions and use that assessment in later interactions with the same informant in ...

Assessment of adult psychopathology relies heavily on self-reports. To determine how well self-reports agree with reports by "informants" who know the person being assessed, the authors examined 51,000 articles published over 10 years in 52 peer-reviewed journals for correlations between self-reports and "informants" reports. Qualifying correlations were found in 108 (0.2%) of the articles. Whe...

Much recent evidence shows that preschoolers are sensitive to the accuracy of an informant. Faced with two informants, one of whom names familiar objects accurately and the other inaccurately, preschoolers subsequently prefer to learn the names and functions of unfamiliar objects from the more accurate informant. This study examined the inference process underlying this preference. We asked whe...

Discrepancies among informants' ratings of child psychopathology have important implications for diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. Typically, parents and children complete measures (e.g., self-report checklists, diagnostic instruments) to assess child dysfunction. Ratings gathered from these sources reveal relatively little agreement on the nature and extent of the child's social, emotional...