Poster #2 - Biases in Interpretation and Memory in Young Children: Linkages to Maternal Reminiscing

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

A substantial body of work demonstrates that parent-guided reminiscing plays an essential role in the development of children’s autobiographical remembering skills. Through these dialogues, children learn how to search their memory for the details of past experiences and relay these recollections in a narrative form to others (Nelson & Fivush, 2020). Little is known, however, about the role of such exchanges in shaping how children come to interpret and remember specific personal experiences.

In an initial examination of these issues, Principe and colleagues (2019) asked mothers and their children to reminisce about shared events that evoked positive or negative emotions. Then, children independently experienced a scripted event that included a series of ambiguous social interactions. Results indicated that children of mothers who made more mentions of negative emotion when reminiscing were especially likely to interpret the ambiguous aspects of the scripted event in a negative manner as the event was ongoing. When later asked to recall the event, these children were prone to produce distortions in memory that incorporated their previous negative interpretations.

This pattern suggests that mothers who focus on the negative when talking about past events may put their children at risk for developing negative interpretation and memory biases. This is an important finding for discussions of depression because such biases are not merely associated with depression but also drive the onset and maintenance of the disorder (Dalgleish & Werner-Seidler, 2014). As such, is important to explore what sorts of early experiences might contribute to their development.

In the current study, we aimed to replicate and extend Principe and colleagues (2019) findings in a sample of mothers with a history of depression to determine if mothers who have a tendency towards depression might frame conversations about the past with more negative attributions, causes, and resolutions than non-depressed mothers. If so, mothers with depression may put their children at risk for learning negative memory biases in the context of memory sharing interactions.

Participants in this study were children (aged 3 to 6 years) of mothers with and without a history of major depressive disorder. Mothers’ diagnoses were confirmed with a diagnostic interview (the Quick Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5 Disorders, First & Williams, 2021).

Our findings replicated and extended Principe and colleagues’ work by demonstrating that mothers’ negative focus during reminiscing was associated with children’s proneness to interpret and remember ambiguous aspects a staged event in a negation fashion, and this relation was strongest in children of mothers with depression. Additional analyses explore relations between children’s independent remembering and their mothers’ performance on an ambiguous stories task as well as additional features of mothers’ conversational scaffolding, such the tendencies to explain and regulate children’s expressions of negative emotion.

These findings offer some insight into a mechanism through which mothers with depression might contribute to the development of negative interpretation and memory biases that have been linked to depressed states, and thus hold promise for treatment and prevention efforts.

Authors

• Gabrielle F Principe, College of Charleston
  Presenting Author

• Daniel Greenberg

• Leah Lancellotta, College of Charleston

• Ava Lubin, College of Charleston

• Gabrielle Volz, College of Charleston

• Frannie Cohen-Dumani, College of Charleston

• Izabella Baipho, College of Charleston