High elaborative parent-child reminiscing plays a significant role in preschoolers??? development of autobiographical memory, and, given the emotional salience of many past events, may also contribute to the development of emotion knowledge and other socio-cognitive skills. Additionally, whilst research has traditionally focused on reminiscing style, emotional content may also be important for child outcomes. In Study 1, a naturalistic paradigm was employed to examine associations of parents??? reminiscing style and emotion references with children???s emotion knowledge. Twenty-five parent-child dyads each discussed four emotionally salient past events. It was found that high elaborative parents more often discussed emotions causes than did other parents; in turn, a high elaborative style and discussion of emotion causes were each uniquely associated with children???s emotion knowledge. In Study 2 an experimental paradigm was used to examine the impact of emotion-oriented reminiscing on 88 children???s memory for a staged, emotion-rich event. Two days after participating in the event, children reminisced with an experimenter in one of four ways. Emotion-cause, emotion-expression, and no-emotion reminiscing were all high elaborative but differed in emotion content. Minimal reminiscing was low elaborative. Children who participated in emotion-cause reminiscing and, to a lesser extent, emotion-expression reminiscing, recalled significantly more emotional and non-emotional information about the event than did children who participated in no-emotion or minimal reminiscing. Study 3 aimed to extend the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by training mothers to reminisce using a high elaborative style and emotion content. 80 dyads initially participated; 44 completed all stages. After training, mothers and children in the reminiscing condition each used a more elaborative style and discussed emotions more than did their counterparts in a powerful ???child directed play??? control condition. These differences were sustained across six months, at which time children in the reminiscing condition also showed better emotion cause knowledge than did children in the control condition. Taken together, these findings suggest that children???s autobiographical memory and emotion knowledge may each develop via shared reminiscing interactions in the preschool years. In each case, the role of high-elaborative, emotion-rich reminiscing is highlighted.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/242988 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Wareham, Penny, Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Psychology |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Penny Wareham, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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