Exploring Parent-Child Reminiscing Style and Internal-State Talk When Discussing Positive and Negative Shared Events

Abstract

Conversations between parents and children about past events play a critical role in children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Parents scaffold their children in learning to recount details of their autobiographical memories by creating a space to reflect on internal states, specifically emotions and cognitions. Parents with an ‘elaborative’ reminiscing style are responsive to children’s utterances and ask open-ended questions (e.g., What do you remember about...?). Parents who are less ‘elaborative’ typically ask narrow questions like Did you like it?” that do not encourage conversation. Children whose parents use an elaborative reminiscing style have children who produce the most detailed narratives. While these conclusions are mainly based on conversations of positive events, the present study aimed to examine how children’s internal-state talk (IST) differs when reminiscing about positive and negative events, as well as how children’s internal-state talk is influenced by parents’ reminiscing style. Memories of negative events are qualitatively different to memories of positive events with the former focusing on what happened and the latter focusing on the meaning of the event. Thirty parent-child dyads (ages 3-6) reminisced two shared events, a positive event and a negative event. Parent-child conversations were transcribed and coded for children’s internal-state talk (emotional and cognitive IST), as well as parents’ reminiscing style. The results showed that children used more internal-state talk, specifically emotion IST, during discussions of negative events compared with positive events. Contrary to previous research, parents’ use of low elaboration strategies did not hinder children’s use of internal-state talk. No significant interactions were found between event valence and reminiscing style