In the wake of growing interest in the development of very young children's intention, desire, and emotion understanding, the issue of children's competencies in their peer interactions has been largely ignored. Social referencing studies have suggested that by 12 months of age infants have the ability to use emotion-laden information provided by an adult to modify their behavior toward a strange or novel object. In this study, a social referencing paradigm was employed to examine whether 12- , 18-, and 24-month-old children can use an older child's positive and negative expressions towards one toy (but not toward a distracter toy) to direct their own behavior toward or away from that toy. Results indicated that when presented with an older child's affect towards a novel toy 12-month-old children performed randomly while 18-month-old children reduced their touch to the target toy in the negative condition only. Twenty-four-month-old children increased their touch to both toys regardless of the direction of the affect that they viewed. The results suggest that the developmental course of understanding and utilizing older children's emotions differs substantially from the ability to glean and use emotion information provided by adults
