Memory for emotional experiences in the context of attachment and social interaction style☆
Section snippets
Emotional and attachment-related memory
A large body of research has pointed to the unique nature of memory for emotional events. Specifically, whether referring to an event (stories involving emotional and non-emotional behavior; Davidson, Luo, & Burden, 2001), experimental stimuli (emotional vs. neutral words; Kensinger & Corkin, 2003) or state of mind (Bishop, Dalgleish, & Yule, 2004), memory is generally increased for emotional as compared to neutral stimuli. Multiple theoretical approaches exist to explain the unique nature of
Individual differences in attachment and memory
In addition to important characteristics of the event, how the child processes, stores, and retrieves the event is modulated by individual differences. Specifically, individual differences in the organization of children's attachment system result from the developmental and relational history of the child. This attachment organization is activated by events high in attachment relevance and will play a role in how the events are processed (Alexander & O’Hara, 2009). This may occur through
Parent–child interaction as developmental context
Another important contribution to the context in which children develop is the pattern parents use to interact about past events. Parent–child interactions resulting in a greater number of opportunities to practice open communication regarding emotional events have been associated with an increase in children's emotional understanding (DeRosnay and Harris, 2002, Greig and Howe, 2001, Laible and Thompson, 1998, Ontai and Thompson, 2002). Thus, parent–child interaction style may be associated
The present study
The goal of the current study was to identify event characteristics important to children's recall of emotional stimuli matched in arousal but varied in valence and attachment relevance. A second goal was to examine sources of individual difference in children's recall for these different event characteristics. To this end, we assessed children's attachment, parents’ attachment, and parental interaction style. First, it was hypothesized that children would recall more details about negative
Participants
The sample consisted of 42 children (27 female) recruited from the community via flyers and community events. Parents were contacted via phone and those who agreed to participate visited the laboratory on two occasions, where children were tested individually. Based on parent report, children were selected to be strongly right-handed and native English speakers with no known developmental delays. Children ranged in age from 7 to 12 years (M = 9.19 years, SD = 1.33). Parents’ ages ranged from 31 to
Preliminary analyses
Means for target predictor and memory variables are included in Table 1. To examine whether order of stimulus presentation at encoding affected children's memory, a series of analyses of variance (ANOVAs) was conducted and no differences were detected, Fs (1, 39) < 1. Thus, encoding orders are collapsed for further analyses. Next, gender effects were examined. Gender was significantly related to the number of correct details recalled about reunion stimuli, t (39) = 2.06, p < .05, with girls recalling
Discussion
The results underscore the importance of considering the nature of emotional events in predicting variation in memory, in that not all emotional events are recalled in the same way. In addition, qualities of children's developmental context (i.e., primary social relationships) predict recall. An integrated model of emotional memory has been proposed that draws together each of these elements to help explain the historically inconsistent findings on emotional memory. The current results will be
Conclusions
The current findings underscore the need to consider multiple qualities of events, particularly attachment relatedness, when examining children's emotional memory. Further, they add to a growing body of evidence that social contextual factors make important contributions to children's memory about emotional experiences. Despite the theoretical implications of these results, limitations exist. First, the sample was relatively small, particularly for findings involving parental elaboration, and
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A systematic review of the reliability of children's event reports after discussing experiences with a naïve, knowledgeable, or misled parent
2018, Developmental ReviewCitation Excerpt :Effects of parental questioning. Three studies with naïve parents (Alexander et al., 2010; Sun et al., 2016; Warren & Peterson, 2014) found that variation in parental questioning was associated with the amount of information children reported during subsequent memory interviews. Parents in the study conducted by Warren and Peterson (2014) asked significantly more questions requiring limited answers such as two-option forced choice questions than open-ended questions (i.e., prompts that elicit free recall responses, such as “Tell me what happened”) when discussing a video of a theft (which the parents did not watch) with their 7- to 10-year-olds.
How children remember the Strange Situation: The role of attachment
2018, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyThe vigilance-avoidance model of avoidant recognition: An ERP study under threat priming
2016, Psychiatry ResearchCitation Excerpt :Therefore, attachment behavior under threatening situations can be effectively explored (Birgegard and Granqvist, 2004; Mikulincer et al., 2002; Edelstein and Gillath, 2008). In the present study, participants were asked to recall three specific negative experiences involving their parents, good friends or romantic partners, for memorable attachment-related negative experiences were more likely to activate attachment systems in avoidant individuals (Alexander et al., 2010; Miller and Noitor, 1999). In general, we hypothesized that avoidant attachment would interact with behavioral and ERP patterns in response to positive and negative attachment-related pictures.
Mother-child reminiscing at risk: Maternal attachment, elaboration, and child autobiographical memory specificity
2016, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Fearful avoidance has been most associated with disruptions in sense of self and emotions because individuals with fearful avoidance have been shown to have higher levels of emotional maladjustment than individuals with other forms of insecure attachment (Anderson & Alexander, 1996; Carnelley, Pietromonaco, & Jaffe, 1994; Feeney, 1999; Murphy & Bates, 1997). Although previous work has examined maternal attachment within the contexts of mother–child interactions such as reminiscing (e.g., Fivush & Sales, 2006) and child memory (e.g., Alexander et al., 2010; Chae et al., 2014) independently, no examinations have considered attachment, reminiscing, and child memory together. Parents with secure attachment styles tend to be more elaborative during reminiscing (Bost et al., 2006; Coppola, Ponzetti, & Vaughn, 2013; Reese, 2008).
Caregiver-child reminiscing and recounting across contexts
2020, Cognitive DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :Third, we hypothesized that caregivers’ use of elaborations during the recounting conversation would interact with conversation goal to predict child accuracy. While caregiver elaborativeness is typically positively associated with child recall, it is possible for caregivers to be overly elaborative to the point of intrusion (Alexander et al., 2010; Lawson, Rodriguez-Steen, & London, 2018; Sun, Greenhoot, & Kelton, 2016). We suspected that caregivers in the Fact condition would be motivated to question their children to the point of intrusion, thus causing their elaborations to have a null or even detrimental effect on children’s recall.
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This research was supported by grants to Rosemarie Kraft from the Agricultural Experiment Station at UC Davis. We thank the many undergraduate and graduate research assistants who made this project possible and to Dr. Robyn Fivush for insightful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. Special thanks go to the families who volunteered their time to participate in this study. For copies of the stimuli, contact the corresponding author.