When Parents Know Little about What Happened: Parent‐guided Conversations, Stress, and Young Children's Eyewitness Memory

Abstract

This study examined how 4- to 7-year-olds' memories for a stressor were influenced by conversations with a parent who had little knowledge of the target event, and the stress children experienced before, during, and after the event. Children (N = 43) watched a mildly stressful video before talking about it with a parent. Parents were asked to focus on either the children's feelings or the content of the video itself. A researcher interviewed the children about their memory following the conversation. Behavioral and physiological measures of children's stress were collected at multiple stages. Children recalled more inaccurate information with the parent than with the interviewer. Younger age and parent insecure attachment were associated with poorer memory. Manipulation of parents' emotion orientation did not predict memory, but individual differences in the talk did, although in different ways from what would be expected from research on conversations about shared events. Less stress (according to self-reported happiness and observed negative affect) before and after, but not during, the stressor was linked with better memory. Implications for children's memory in legal settings are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Review of Reminiscing in Early Childhood Settings and Links to Sustained Shared Thinking

“…Also, reminiscing in an early year context may involve more discussion of non-shared rather than shared experiences. There is some evidence that when mothers and children reminisce about non-shared experiences there could be negative effects on children's memory for those events, as parents introduce misinformation about what they believe happened (Kulkofsky et al 2008;Sun et al 2016).…”

Parental Bias, Parent-Child Discussion, and Children’s Eyewitness Reports

“…have systematically investigated parent-child discussions of "unshared events" (events that the child experienced without the caregiver; but see Leichtman et al 2000;Sun et al 2016;Warren and Peterson 2014), particularly when caregivers fear a negative event has occurred (Salmon and Reese 2015). Moreover, researchers have just begun to examine how parents discuss an unshared event with their children after receiving biasing information (Goodman et al 1995;Principe et al 2013;Rush et al 2017;Warren and Peterson 2014), or how certain individual differences may influence parents' reactions to biasing information and children's resulting memory performance.…”