The Effects of Conversational Goals on Parent-Child Memory Sharing and Children's Recollections of a Stressful Event

Abstract

This research examined how an emotion regulation goal, compared to a goal of remembering per se, affects the way parents guide conversations with their children about a negative event, and how these conversations impact children's independent memories for that event. Thirty-three 4- to 7-year-old children watched a short, mildly stressful video and then discussed it with a parent in one of two conditions: in the Fact-Focused (FF) condition (n =17), parents were asked to find out what happened, whereas in the Emotion-Focused (EE) condition (n =16) parents were instructed to help children regulate their feelings about the video. Shortly afterward, children were interviewed about their memories. We coded the content of parent-child conversations for references to several categories (e.g., emotions, facts, associative talk), and also assessed the accuracy and completeness of children's independent recall. Parents and children in the EF group made more references to emotions during the conversations than those in the FF group, but the two groups did not differ in other content categories. There were no group differences in children's memory performance, but parent emotion talk interacted with group in predicting child memory: in the FF group, parents' emotion talk was linked to poorer child memory across multiple indicators, but in the EF group it was unrelated or positively related to children's memory performance. Interestingly, parents who made more references to video facts had children who recalled less, but children's own fact talk predicted better memories. Also, children's emotional reactions and parent-child non-verbal interaction during the conversations predicted several parent conversation measures. These findings suggest that parents and children reciprocally influence each other in memory sharing. Discussion will address implications for understanding the transactional, dynamic nature of parent-child conversations and their influence on children's memories for negative events.