This study examined mother-child conversations about children's and adolescents' past harmful and helpful actions. The sample included 100 mothers and their 7-, 11-, or 16-year-old children; each dyad discussed events when the child (a) helped a friend and (b) hurt a friend. Analyses suggested that conversations about help may serve to facilitate children's sense of themselves as prosocial moral agents; mothers focused on children's feelings of pride, positive judgments of the child's behavior, and positive insights about the child's characteristics that could be drawn from the event. In turn, conversations about harm were more elaborated and contentious than those about help, and reflected more complex maternal goals; although mothers highlighted children's wrongdoing (e.g., by noting negative consequences of the child's actions for others), they also engaged in a variety of strategies that may support children's ability to reconcile their harmful actions with a positive self-view (e.g., by noting what children did do well or their capacity for repair). With respect to age effects, results revealed that older children played an increasingly active and spontaneous role in discussions. Furthermore, as compared with 7-year-olds, conversations with 11- and 16-year-olds focused more on psychological insights that could be drawn from experiences and less on children's concrete harmful and helpful actions. Overall, results illuminate the processes whereby conversations with mothers may further children's developing understandings of their own and others' moral agency, and how discussions of prosocial and transgressive moral experiences may provide distinct but complementary opportunities for moral socialization.

Admonitions to tell one’s story in order to feel better reflect the belief that narrative is an effective emotion regulation tool. The present studies evaluate the effectiveness of narrative for regulating sadness and anger, and provide quantitative comparisons of narrative with distraction, reappraisal, and reexposure. The results for sadness (n = 93) and anger (n = 89) reveal that narrative is effective at down-regulating negative emotions, particularly when narratives place events in the past tense and include positive emotions. The results suggest that if people tell the “right” kind of story about their experiences, narrative reduces emotional distress linked to those experiences.

Researchers commonly use repeated-measures actor-partner interdependence models (RM-APIM) to understand how romantic partners change in relation to one another over time. However, traditional interpretations of the results of these models do not fully or correctly capture the dyadic temporal patterns estimated in RM-APIM. Interpretation of results from these models largely focuses on the meaning of single-parameter estimates in isolation from all the others. However, considering individual coefficients separately impedes the understanding of how these associations combine to produce an interdependent pattern that emerges over time. Additionally, positive within-person, or actor, effects are commonly misinterpreted as indicating growth from one time point to the next when they actually represent decline. We suggest that change-as-outcome RM-APIMs and vector field diagrams (VFDs) can be used to improve the understanding and presentation of dyadic patterns of association described by standard RM-APIMs. The current article briefly reviews the conceptual foundations of RM-APIMs, demonstrates how change-as-outcome RM-APIMs and VFDs can aid interpretation of standard RM-APIMs, and provides a tutorial in making VFDs using multilevel modeling. (PsycINFO Database Record

This study examined children's and adolescents' narrative accounts of everyday experiences when they harmed and helped a friend. The sample included 100 participants divided into three age groups (7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds). Help narratives focused on the helping acts themselves and reasons for helping, whereas harm narratives included more references to consequences of acts and psychological conflicts. With age, however, youth increasingly described the consequences of helping. Reasons for harming others focused especially on the narrator's perspective whereas reasons for helping others were centered on others' perspectives. With age, youth increasingly drew self-related insights from their helpful, but not their harmful, actions. Results illuminate how reflections on prosocial and transgressive experiences may provide distinct opportunities for constructing moral agency.

The study's goals were twofold: (a) to examine the effectiveness of narrating an angry experience, compared with relying on distraction or mere reexposure to the experience, for anger reduction across childhood and adolescence, and (b) to identify the features of narratives that are associated with more and less anger reduction for younger and older youths and for boys and girls. Participants were 241 youths (117 boys) between the ages of 8 and 17. When compared with mere reexposure, narration was effective at reducing youth's anger both concurrently and in lasting ways; though narration was less effective than distraction at concurrently reducing anger, its effect was longer lasting. Contrary to expectation, there were no overall age differences in the relative effectiveness of narration for anger reduction; however, the analyses of the quality of youth's narratives and of the relations between various narrative features and reductions in anger indicated that narration works to reduce distress among youth via processes that are distinct from those postulated for adults. Altogether, this study's findings lend strong support to the potential of narration for helping youth across a broad age range manage anger experiences in ways that can reduce distress. (PsycINFO Database Record