The influence of another's perspective on children's recall of previously misconstrued events.

Abstract

Children's abilities to reframe their memories of events after hearing another child's perspective of the same events were examined, and links between memory reframing, cognitive ability, and social competence were explored. Nine- to 11-year-olds (N = 79) were told to imagine that the events in a narrated story happened to them. Next, they heard another story that described either the same events (experimental condition) or unrelated events (control condition) from another child's perspective. The children in the experimental group reframed their memories in light of the alternative perspective, whereas the children in the control condition did not. Children with higher cognitive scores had higher memory reframing scores and received higher social competence ratings than children with lower cognitive scores.

Longitudinal Analysis of Children's Internal States Language and Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms Following a Natural Disaster

“…Expression of internal states is thought to be beneficial because it leads to the extinction of distressing thoughts and feelings about negative events and may help people make sense of and positively reframe those events, but these sorts of processes may depend on cognitive and emotion-regulation skills that are not well developed in preadolescent children. For instance, the memory and narrative literatures indicate that the reconstructive memory processes that are likely to be involved in reframing negative memories and finding resolutions undergo significant change across childhood (e.g., Tsethlikai & Greenhoot, 2006), and the ability to find meaning in past events does not appear until adolescence and improves with age (McLean & Thorne, 2003;McAdams, Diamond, de St. Aubin, & Mansfield, 1997). Furthermore, it is well known that children have far more difficulty regulating negative states than adolescents (e.g., Brenner & Salovey, 1997;Compas et al, 2001).…”

“…One explanation for this apparent age-related discrepancy is that the benefits of disclosing one's thoughts and emotions may depend on developmentally advanced cognitive abilities and emotion-regulation skills. The literatures on children's storytelling, narrative, and memory development indicate that children's abilities to construct cohesive and explanatory stories and to adaptively reframe negative events all undergo significant change across childhood (e.g., Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 1996;Habermas & Bluck, 2000;Tsethlikai & Greenhoot, 2006). Likewise, the ability to cope with negative thoughts and emotions also improves substantially across childhood (e.g., Brenner & Salovey, 1997;Compas, 1987;Compas, Connor-Smith, Saltzman, Thomsen, & Wadsworth, 2001).…”

The influence of a friend's perspective on American Indian children's recall of previously misconstrued events.

“…The children listened to two prerecorded stories using headphones and a cassette player. The current study used the same stories as Tsethlikai and Greenhoot's (2006) study; the stories were not altered in any way. Story 1 described a number of events before the participant's birthday in which Sara/Eric played an important role.…”

“…A categorized block-cued, directed-forgetting task was used as a measure that was targeted specifically at intentional cognitive inhibition (Wilson, Kipp, & Daniels, 2003). This test was not used in Tsethlikai and Greenhoot's (2006) study. This particular categorized block-cued, directed-forgetting task has been used successfully with children as young as 6 years of age.…”

“…A small number of studies have shown that shifting from one perspective to another after the initial encoding has taken place can influence later recall (R. Anderson, Pichert, & Shirey, 1983;Borland, Flammer, & Wearing, 1987;Tversky & Marsh, 2000). Only one study has examined the impact of hearing another person's perspective on children's memory: Tsethlikai and Greenhoot (2006) found that working memory capacity and verbal ability were related to 9-to 11-year-old children's ability to reframe their recall of a series of events involving conflict with a friend after hearing the friend's point of view. Children with more advanced cognitive skills were more likely to coordinate the perspective of the friend with their own perspective in memory than children with poorer cognitive skills.…”