Maternal Reminiscing Style and Children’s Developing Understanding of Self and Emotion

By Robyn Fivush. 2007

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Individual differences in how mothers structure reminiscing about shared past experiences with their preschool children are related to children’s developing autobiographical memory skills and understanding of self and emotion. More specifically, mothers who engage in highly elaborative reminiscing have children who come to tell more coherent and emotionally expressive autobiographical narratives, and these children also show better understanding of self and are better able to regulate emotion than children of less elaborative mothers. This body of research is reviewed and relations between maternal reminiscing style and children’s developing self and emotional understanding are explicated.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd085ea8cfc7aaabad83f4538a058cc324f0ead8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. L. Brody
2. Judith A. Hall
3. Amy L. Gentzler
4. Robyn Fivush
5. Elaine Reese
6. Qi Wang
7. D. Laible
8. C. Haden

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. L. Brody
2. Judith A. Hall
3. Amy L. Gentzler
4. Robyn Fivush

In Sociology and Political Science

1. L. Brody
2. Amy L. Gentzler
3. Judith A. Hall
4. Emily Keener
5. Kathryn A. Kerns
6. Robyn Fivush
7. Elaine Reese

Citations in the corpus

• Emotional reactions and regulatory responses to negative and positive events: Associations with attachment and gender (2010, background): “Parents communicate expectations about the value and appropriateness of emotions and ER to their children, and consequently, children learn to conform to these expectations (e.g., Fivush 2007; Wood et al. 1997).”
• Remembering and reminiscing: How individual lives are constructed in family narratives (2008, background): “By the end of the preschool years, most children are able to provide a reasonably coherent narrative of a personally experienced event (Eisenberg, 1985; Fivush, 2007).”
• Gender, Emotion, and Socialization (2010, background): “By the end of the preschool years, and then throughout development, girls and women tell longer, more relationally oriented, and more emotionally laden narratives about their past than do boys and men (Davis, 1999; Fivush, 2007).”
• Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy: A Review of Research and Theoretical Framework (2012, background): “Similarly, children of parents with greater awareness of children’s emotions, as measured by their use of emotion talk, show more emotion understanding (Denham & Auerbach, 1995; Fivush, 2007) and greater ability to accurately identify emotions in others (Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991) than children”