Parental influences on earliest memories

Abstract

Recently, independent lines of research have indirectly supported the notion that social variables, especially parent-child relationships, have a significant impact on adults' memories of their early life. In order to directly assess this Italian students were asked to recall as many memories involving parents as they could from before the age of 6 in a 3-minute timed recall task (i.e., memory fluency). They also filled out assessments about parental involvement in their lives as well as the quality of their relationships with their mothers and fathers. We found that, for males, the more involved the parents and the warmer the relationships between sons and both their mothers and their fathers, the more early memories, the more positive early memories, and the more episodic memories men recalled. For women, the warmer the relationship with their mothers, the earlier their earliest memory. Results are discussed in terms of gendered parent-child interactions as well as McAdam's emergent life-story theory.

The Language of Memory: Narrating Memories of Parents and Friends

“…Furthermore, those individuals that have parents who are more supportive and involved with their children have relatively more positive memory reports about parents than do those individuals with more conflictual and less positive parent-child relationships [7,34,44]. However, these researchers assessed the overall emotional tone of short memory reports that had been gathered during a memory fluency task rather than assessing the number and emotional valence of specific emotion words in individuals' memory narratives about parents -which are considerably longer than the short reports elicited by a memory fluency task.…”

“…'), whereas narratives describing repeated events or events that extended over days or weeks were classified as repeated event narratives (e.g.,: 'I remember the endless discussions between my parents during my high school years........' or ' Those wonderful evenings with my friends watching the stars during the summer before I began University......'). We followed the same scoring system as used in other research (e.g., Peterson et al, 2008;). …”

Childhood remembered: Reports of both unique and repeated events

“…In these investigations, reports of repeated events occurred frequently. Among children, Peterson et al (2009) Peterson et al (2008) reported that about half the reports of early childhood events consisted of accounts of repeated experiences.It is clear that, when allowed to do so, participants define their childhood memories as involving both unique and repeated experiences. But do the two types of memories serve the same function in autobiographical memory?…”

“…In these investigations, reports of repeated events occurred frequently. Among children, Peterson et al (2009) Peterson et al (2008) reported that about half the reports of early childhood events consisted of accounts of repeated experiences.…”

“…Despite the possibility that repeated events are part of autobiographical memory, researchers have excluded such reports from consideration in many investigations of early childhood memories. For example, using a cue word procedure, researchers have asked for reports of memories for specific, one-time events with both child (Bauer, Burch, Scholin, & Guler, 2007) and adult (Jack & Hayne, 2007;Rubin, 2000) (Artioli, Cicogna, Occhionero, & Reese, 2012;Peterson, Smorti, & Tani, 2008); and the presentation of a fluency task to children (Peterson et al, 2009) and adults (Peterson et al, 2008).…”