Abstract
The way that parents discuss the past with their preschool children plays a signifcant role in the development of children's store of personal memories, that is, their autobiographical memory. In this study we investigated two questions: frst, whether parents who engage their children in high-relative to low-elaborative conversations about the past using "wh" questions and descriptive information also include more emotion references, and second, whether emotion content was associated with children's emotion knowledge. Twenty-fve European Australian preschoolers discussed four emotionoriented events with a parent. Controlling for age and language, parents' elaborative utterances and their explanations of emotion causes (but not other emotion references) were each signifcantly associated with children's emotion knowledge. Follow-up regression analyses revealed high-elaborative utterances to be the stronger predictor. These fndings extend those of past research in highlighting the multiple associations between reminiscing and children's developing understanding of emotion.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 51-56 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | New Zealand Journal of Psychology |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 2010 |
| Externally published | Yes |