The Roles of Maternal Elaborativeness and Individuation on Children's Elaborativeness in Researcher-Child Recounting Task

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Maternal reminiscing style is a significant predictor of children’s autobiographical memory outcomes (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Thus, studies focused on maternal characteristics contributing to individual differences in reminiscing style, and they found that maternal self-value orientation is associated with maternal elaborativeness (Wang, 2007). For instance, maternal individuation orientation was a significant predictor of mothers’ higher elaborativeness levels both in reminiscing (Sahin-Acar & Leichtman, 2015) and recounting (Sahin-Acar et al., 2019) conversations. Even though the role of maternal individuation on maternal memory outcomes was investigated, there is still a need for research focusing on how maternal self-value orientation and reminiscing style might affect children’s independent memory outcomes.
The current study aimed to test the roles of maternal reminiscing elaborativeness, and self-construal orientation on children’s elaborativeness in an independent researcher-child recounting task. 278 preschool-age children (Mmonth = 65.16, SD = 4.64), and their mothers (Mage = 35.96, SD = 4.75) participated in the current study. Mother-child dyads were asked to talk about a one-time event that they experienced together as they usually do. Additionally, children were asked by a trained researcher to tell an event that they experienced with their mothers recently. Both conversations were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The memory conversations were coded based on coding schemes in the literature to determine mothers' and children's elaborativeness separately (Fivush, & Vasudeva, 2002). Two trained coders coded 100% of the data; inter-coder reliability was in between .77 to .97 for child codings, and .83 to .97 for maternal codings. In addition, mothers were asked to fill the Balanced Integration-Differentiation Scale (Imamoglu, 1998; 2003) to assess maternal individuation orientation. In the current study, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was found as .65 for the individuation orientation subscale.
The mediating role of maternal reminiscing elaborativeness on the link between maternal individuation orientation and children’s recounting elaborativeness was investigated via PROCESS Macro (Hayes, 2015). The results showed that maternal individuation significantly predicted maternal elaborativeness in the reminiscing task (B = .015, SE = .006, p = .002, 95% CI [.002, .028]), and maternal reminiscing elaborativeness significantly associated with children’s recounting elaborativeness (B = .127, SE = .043, p = .003, 95% CI [.042, .213]). To test the significance of indirect effect, Bootstrap Sampling Method with 5000 resamples was implemented (Preacher & Hayes, 2004). According to results, maternal reminiscing elaborativeness significantly mediated the link between maternal individuation and children’s recounting elaborativeness (B = .002, SE = .001, 95% CI [.000, .005]) (Figure 1).
Although the unstandardized coefficients were low, these results demonstrated that maternal individuation orientation is an essential factor for children’s independent memory outcomes. Future studies should continue to examine the roles of maternal self-value orientation and reminiscing elaborativeness on children’s independent memory skills across different age groups of children.

Keywords: reminiscing, recounting, self-construal, autobiographical memory, mother-child communication.

Authors

• Yagmur Ilgun, Middle East Technical University
  Presenting Author

• Aysu Alkis, Middle East Technical University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Basak Sahin-Acar, Middle East Technical University
  Non-Presenting Author