Mothers' negative focus during memory-sharing conversations is linked to negative interpretation and memory biases in young children

Abstract

Parent-guided reminiscing helps children learn how to interpret and recollect personal experiences. These interpretive abilities are important because many experiences are ambiguous, and a tendency toward negative interpretation is associated with emotional disorders. Here, we explore whether naturally-occurring variations in parent-guided reminiscing are associated with children's interpretation and recall of novel ambiguous events. Mothers and their children (aged 5–6 years) reminisced about three shared negative events. Next, children were read several stories that described ambiguous social situations and were asked to invent endings that involved making an inference about motives of others in the stories. Later, children were asked questions to elicit story recall. Mothers who used more negative terms during reminiscing had children who were more likely to invent negative story endings and distort story recall negatively. Thus, mothers who frame memory-sharing conversations with children negatively might put them at risk for developing negative interpretation and memory biases.