Emotion-oriented reminiscing and children's recall of a novel event

Abstract

An experimental paradigm examined the impact of elaborative, emotion- and non-emotion-focused reminiscing on 83 younger (3–4 years) and older (5–6 years) children's memory for a staged “visit to the zoo” event. Two days after participating in the narrated event, children were engaged in one of four types of reminiscing: emotion-cause (causes of the animals' emotions were described), emotion-expression (animals' emotion expressions were described), no-emotion (animals' physical characteristics were described), or minimal (control). All but the minimal condition reminisced elaboratively. Two weeks later, children who reminisced about emotions, particularly in the emotion-cause condition, recalled more emotional and non-emotional information overall than did children in the no-emotion or minimal conditions. During free recall older children recalled an equal amount in the emotion-cause and emotion-expression conditions, but younger children did not. The findings suggest that elaborative, emotional reminiscing benefits children's recall to a greater extent than does elaborative, non-emotional reminiscing.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Reminiscing
• Autobiographical memory
• Memory development
• Experimental design

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Penny Van Bergen

Penny Van Bergen is now at the Department of Education, Macquarie University, Australia

Karen Salmon

Karen Salmon is now at the School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand