Early Childhood Memories Research Articles

Troubled Relationships

This qualitative study explored 18 high-risk adolescent Latinas’ perceptions of their relationships with nonresident fathers. A number of interrelated factors—early childhood memories, mothers’ interpretations, and fathers’ behaviors—shaped girls’ perceptions, which in turn, influenced how they interacted with fathers. Some girls struggled to make sense of fathers’ diminished involvement and continued to long for them. Others grew angry and refused to have anything to do with hostile and aggressive fathers. Some girls never knew or did not remember their fathers, and they were largely indifferent. In contrast, other girls were conflicted and shifted back and forth between being angry with fathers, longing for them, and attempting to assume an air of indifference. Only one girl noted that she had a positive, loving relationship with her father. Implications for study findings are discussed.

P-685 - Therapy group and work at the acute forensic ward

Therapy Group consisted usually of 6 to 10 forensic patients, who are at the AFW. Therapy Sessions are twice a week, last - per an hour. The choice of Themes is mainly spontaneous one, with the preliminary about ten minutes time to know how the patients are, what are the news for everyone of them, is there any question, individually or at the ward, to be subjected within the group - here and now. During the time the working theme could arise in the frame of reference of the group, such as - some questions, associations, propositions, whether some member(s) of the group or therapist, could give… The therapy work strategy is concentrated to the themes directly connected to the patients. The work may concern the life and living needs and problems at ward, the mutual relationship, and, especially, the events and people from the past and nowadays of the any of group members. Their experience includes the topics, valid for the general mental energy, wellbeing, better health condition, contacts to the world, family, thinking, emotional needs, hope, contact to the basic living conflicts with the possibilities of solving, the skills, knowledge, memories… The themes have some order however - the memories of early childhood concerning some close and fine experience, connect to the memories of more events with the good experience, the later childhood follows the early childhod, some good primary family members could associate some cousins, etc…

Melancholic Ghosts in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt

In The Melancholy of Race Anne Anlin Cheng observes that melancholia alludes not to per se but to entangled relationship with loss (2001, 8). It is precisely these entanglements with which this essay is concerned. Monique Truong's 2003 bestseller, The Book of Salt, offers a telling case study in and melancholia in diaspora, as haunted protagonist Binh copes with his expulsion from family and country. The Book of Salt is narrated by Binh, a gay exile Irving in Paris and working as a live-in chef for Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1930s at their famed residence at 27 rue de Fleurus. The narrative continually shifts in time and place, shuttling between Saigon, Paris, and sea, as Binh slowly recounts his life story, fragment by fragment. As his story unwinds, we learn that Binh was disowned by his abusive, alcoholic father - to whom Binh refers only as Man - when he learns that Binh has had an affair with Frenchman Bleriot, chef de cuisine at governor- general s house in Saigon where Binh works as a low-level cook. With nowhere else to go, Binh escapes to wide open sea where he spends next three years working as a galley cook before finally settling in Paris and finding his Mesdames Stein and Toklas. Binh works for couple for nearly five years, from 1929 until their return to United States in 1934, during which time he meets and begins an affair with Marcus Lattimore, a mixedrace African American passing as white, who attends Stein's Saturday salons. The Book of Salt is a deeply haunted text, from Old Man's voice that echoes in Binh's head as a constant reproach, to ghostly figure of the man on bridge (a fictionalized Ho Chi Minh) whom Binh longs to meet again, to Binh's own invisibility as he wanders streets of Paris.Banished from his family and country for his homosexuality, Binh is profoundly melancholic, holding on to life he lost through memory and repetition. The elliptical narration, continually returning to Binh's life in Vietnam, demonstrates how fully his present is saturated by past. Binh psychically preserves moment of his expulsion from home by literally internalizing voice of his disapproving father. Indeed, when Binh recounts day his father disowned him, he repeats phrase stand there still (Truong 2004, 164). This refers, at once, to momentary paralysis Binh experiences as his father berates and disowns him (still as in motionless) and to Binh's inability to move on emotionally from this traumatic scene of rejection (still as in continued until now) (OED). Just as he is haunted by violence and hatred of his father, Binh similarly relives love and nurturing he received from his mother. He compulsively and longingly cuts tips of his fingers while he cooks, transporting himself back to an early childhood memory in which his mother cradled him close to her body as she tended to his bloody fingers, soothing him with song, after he cut himself for first time while chopping scallions with her. Binh's every moment in Paris is achingly bound up with his past. Haunted by a home and family to which he cannot return, Binh wills his own psychic return through these compulsive repetitions of past.Moreover, novel itself is haunted - a literary project produced through Truong's conjuring of dead. Her central figure, Binh, is a composite character based on two chefs, Trac and Nguyen, who worked for Stein and Toklas in Paris. In The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Toklas describes their insecure, unstable, unreliable, but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with (1954, 186). Although Trac and Nguyen are only two Vietnamese chefs Toklas names, she and Stein employed a succession of them while in Paris (187). While Toklas expresses a certain condescending affection for Trac and Nguyen - Gertrude Stein and I thought Nguyen delightfully Chinese (188) - she describes Indo-Chinese men she and Stein employed as alternately liars, gamblers, drunks, womanizers, and drug addicts (187). …

The relation of the conceptual self to recent and distant autobiographical memories

Based on the self-memory system model (SMS; Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2004) of autobiographical memory, this study uses a large sample of young and middle-aged adults to investigate the relation between individuals’ current self-characteristics and the content of both their earliest childhood memory and a recent memory. In the first session, participants’ current self-characteristics were assessed. In the second session, individuals provided a written narrative of their earliest childhood memory and a more recent memory (within-participants design) and rated the self themes present in each memory. In keeping with the SMS model, findings show that current self-characteristics were reflected in individuals’ memories. As predicted, however, recent memories were more frequently linked to current self-characteristics than were earliest memories. All six current self-characteristics predicted the inclusion of these themes in recent memories, but only four self-characteristics were associated with memory themes in earliest memories. The relation between current self-characteristics and memory themes did not differ across young and middle-aged adults, suggesting developmental stability in these relations. Findings provide general support for the SMS model but also suggest possibilities for its extension and refinement.

Early memories, object relations, and current relationship functioning

This study examined the relationship between dependency themes in 140 inpatients' early childhood memories (EM) and social interactions involving dependent behavior. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the type of dependent EM predicted overt behavior above and beyond demographic and diagnostic categories. Patients expressing clinging dependent themes in their narratives had greater involvement in social activities in the therapeutic community program and with nurses, whereas patients expressing counterdependent themes engaged in more hostile interactions with nursing staff members, were more self-destructive, and had more emergency department admissions over the course of inpatient treatment. Results are considered in light of the clinical utility of EMs.

B. Elizabeth Horner: 1916–2009

B. Elizabeth Horner was a dedicated educator, biologist, champion of women and science, and a professor at Smith College where she spent her entire professional life. She was also a long-time member of the American Society of Mammalogists (ASM), having joined in 1947. Betty was born on the 29th of April in 1916 in southern New Jersey to Quaker parents: “… the strict moral disciplines and conservative trends of the Quakers have undoubtedly exercised considerable effect on both my ideas and my ideals,” she wrote in an autobiographical essay for a predoctoral fellowship in 1945. She grew up in an atmosphere of propriety, with her father working in his orchards and her mother an exemplary homemaker. She was not allowed to start school until her brother reached school age, because going on the school bus alone was not considered proper for a girl. Betty's interests were drawn to nature, medicine, and exploration from an early age, even though in those days few women were in these fields. She recalled that her 1st interests in natural history arose from accompanying her father through his fruit orchards, observing not only the trees and their fruit but also the insects that lived on them. “Memories of my early childhood are marked by a background of orchards in bud, orchards in bloom, … orchards in fruit … acres and acres of neatly cultivated orchards …,” she wrote in the autobiographical essay. As a girl she had wanted to become a surgeon but was told that women did not do that. She also came to realize that explorers and scientists were mostly men, and women were homemakers—all of which conflicted with her interest in adventure, science, and nature. She was very aware that these were the mores of the early part of the 20th century …

Are positive psychology exercises helpful for people with depressive personality styles?

Two exercises involving gratitude and uplifting music were tested for their ability to improve well-being in self-critical and needy individuals. In this study, 772 adults completed measures of depressive symptoms, physical symptoms, happiness, and self-esteem and then practiced the gratitude, music, or control exercise (recalling early childhood memories) for 1 week. Follow-up measures were administered after the intervention period, and 1, 3, and 6 months later. Participants in both the gratitude and the music condition reported greater increases in happiness over time than participants in the control condition. Self-critics were particularly responsive to the gratitude intervention, whereas needy individuals found the exercises ineffective and even detrimental to their self-esteem. These results highlight the importance of identifying individual differences in response to positive psychology exercises.

White Body: animating feminine pleasure

<a href="/jms/editor/performances.html#kaylaparker">Link to Performance</a> Following Luce Irigaray’s perspective that femininity ‘may be recovered only in secret, in hiding’ (1985a: 30), my paper investigates the relationship between the moving image screen, feminine pleasure and the body, through critical reflection as an artist film-maker on the plasticine animation <em>White Body </em>(2009): in this practice-as-research film, I manipulate modeling clay, sugar and dust with my fingers under the animation rostrum camera to explore my early childhood memories of secret, transgressive play; seeking to liberate a cascading feminine sensibility through the creative process of working ‘intuitively’ frame-by-frame with materiality and digital technologies.

Childhood amnesia: Empirical evidence for a two-stage phenomenon

The term childhood amnesia refers to the inability of adults to remember events from their infancy and early childhood. If we plot the number of memories that adults can recall as a function of age during childhood, the number of memories reported increases gradually as a function of age. Typically, this finding has been used to argue that gradual changes in memory development contribute to a gradual decline in childhood amnesia during the preschool period. Alternatively, it is possible that pooling data across participants has obscured more abrupt, stage-like changes in the remission of childhood amnesia. In the present study we examined the number and distribution of childhood memories for individual participants. Six adults were repeatedly interviewed about their childhood memories. We found that the distribution of adults' early childhood memories may be less continuous than pooled data suggest. This finding has important implications for current explanations of childhood amnesia.

Origins of adolescents’ autobiographical memories

Adolescents ( N = 46; M = 12.46 years) who had previously participated in a longitudinal study of autobiographical memory development narrated their early childhood memories, interpreted life events, and completed a family history questionnaire and language assessment. Three distinct components of adolescent memory emerged: (1) age of earliest memory and insight into life events; (2) volume of early memories; and (3) density of specific memories from early childhood. Children's language, self-awareness, and theory of mind during early childhood (19–51 months) all contributed to their memories as adolescents. However, adolescents’ early reminiscing environment was the best single predictor of the age and volume of their early memories and their insight into life events. In contrast, adolescents’ delayed self-recognition and reminiscing in early childhood predicted the density of their early memories. These findings provide partial support for theories of autobiographical memory development.

Medial temporal lobe memory in childhood: developmental transitions

The medial temporal lobes (MTL) support declarative memory and mature structurally and functionally during the postnatal years in humans. Although recent work has addressed the development of declarative memory in early childhood, less is known about continued development beyond this period of time. The purpose of this investigation was to explore MTL-dependent memory across middle childhood. Children (6 -10 years old) and adults completed two computerized tasks, place learning (PL) and transitive inference (TI), that each examined relational memory, as well as the flexible use of relational learning. Findings suggest that the development of relational memory precedes the development of the ability to use relational knowledge flexibly in novel situations. Implications for the development of underlying brain areas and ideas for future neuroimaging investigations are discussed.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Once Upon a Time: Explaining Cultural Differences in Episodic Specificity

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Once Upon a Time: Explaining Cultural Differences in Episodic Specificity

Laps(epõlv) 19. sajandi teise poole Eestis omaelulooliste tekstide näitel. Child(hood) in 19th Century Estonia: a Study of Autobiographical Texts

Laps(epõlv) 19. sajandi teise poole Eestis omaelulooliste tekstide näitel. Child(hood) in 19th Century Estonia: a Study of Autobiographical Texts

Memory Focused Interventions (MFI) as a Therapeutic Strategy in Hypnotic Psychotherapy

The prospect of utilizing memory plasticity (the constructive and transitory nature of memory) for therapeutic purposes has not been widely recognized. However, a number of theoretical and clinical venues throughout the last century have shown its potential application. Intensive research conducted during these last decades, pointed out the possibility of influencing human memory in relation to new memories and their specific components. Moreover, the research showed the feasibility of planting alternative early childhood memories and thus altering memories of personal history. Additionally, researchers found that memory is naturally very fallible due to everyday phenomena of forgetfulness, distortion and intrusion of past and present information. Throughout the course of this paper, the integrative overview of these empirical findings with the aforementioned clinical and theoretical foundations serves as a substratum in an attempt to present an integrative therapeutic approach, named Memory Focused Interventions (MFI).

Cracking the Cultural Code of Gambling

International expansion by Las Vegas casino operators has so far been uneven, notably in Macao. Information on different cultures’ understandings of gambling, which is scant, could be instrumental in supporting international expansion. Instead of using the common-macro level cultural comparison survey-based method, this research uses early childhood memory elicitation to focus on how individuals in three countries were initially exposed to gambling in their own families as children. This method is used to uncover the cultural code of gambling in the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and France. The analysis indicates that each culture has its own code for gambling, a code that reveals that culture’s gambling myth. These codes should help marketers understand the underlying motivations for gambling in each culture and should assist casino operators to market more effectively.

Short‐ and long‐term memory in infancy and early childhood: taking the first steps toward remembering. Edited by Lisa M. Oakes and Patricia J. Bauer. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, Oxford, UK, 2007. pp. 337. Price: $50.50, £35.99. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐518229‐3

Short‐ and long‐term memory in infancy and early childhood: taking the first steps toward remembering. Edited by Lisa M. Oakes and Patricia J. Bauer. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, Oxford, UK, 2007. pp. 337. Price: $50.50, £35.99. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐518229‐3

A dual criterion account of the development of linguistic judgment in early childhood

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a meaning came to mind (target generation). The particular criterion that a child adopted was predicted to depend on the efficiency of the phonological or semantic memory processes that supported its use. Fifty-two preschoolers made three linguistic judgments (word familiarity, syntactic acceptability, and object nameability) and received four memory tests. Five correlations between specific memory measures and specific judgments were predicted by the dual criterion account. Five hypotheses about the distinctiveness of these correlations were also tested. The results supported the five predictions as well as three of the distinctiveness hypotheses. The potential of the account for generating new hypotheses about memory and metalinguistic awareness in early childhood was also demonstrated.

Sources of variability in working memory in early childhood: A consideration of age, temperament, language, and brain electrical activity

This study investigated age-related differences in working memory and inhibitory control (WMIC) in 3 1 2 -, 4-, and 4 1 2 -year-olds and how these differences were associated with differences in regulatory aspects of temperament, language comprehension, and brain electrical activity. A series of cognitive control tasks was administered to measure WMIC ability, including the Stroop-like day–night and the yes–no tasks. Baseline and task electroencephalographic data were collected. The Children's Behavior Questionnaire was used to assess caregiver perceptions of temperament with a particular interest in the effortful control and surgency factors, and language comprehension was measured with the Peabody-Picture Vocabulary Test-III. The results of this study demonstrated differential temperament-cognition relations for the three age groups, as positive associations were found between WMIC and effortful control for the 3 1 2 - and 4-year-olds and negative associations were found between WMIC and surgency for the 4 1 2 -year-olds. An increasingly robust relation between WMIC and language comprehension was demonstrated across the three age groups, as well as differential patterns of task-related brain electrical activity.

Eliciting adults’ earliest memories: Does it matter how we ask the question?

For more than a century, psychologists have debated the age of adults’ earliest memories. To date, estimates have ranged from 2 to 6–8 years of age. In this experiment, we examined how the nature of the question used to elicit early memories influenced the age from which memories were retrieved. Young adults provided written descriptions of autobiographical memories and estimated their age at the time of each remembered event. One group was asked to report their six earliest memories. Three other groups were asked to describe memories associated with particular cue words. They were asked to report memories from any time in their lives, to report childhood memories, or to report their earliest memory associated with each word. When participants were asked to report their earliest memories, there was no effect of cue words on the ages of the memories reported. When participants were asked to sample different epochs of their lives, however, the age of the memories they reported differed substantially: asking participants to recall early memories yielded a higher density of events that occurred during the traditional childhood amnesia period. Thus, many early childhood memories may remain available, but may be less accessible than later memories. These data show that the way in which we ask adults to report their early memories affects the age of the memories that are reported, and thus influences the conclusions that may be drawn about the boundary of childhood amnesia.

The Architecture of Forgetting

This article begins where Ibsen himself started when he composed a rare autobiographical sketch in mid‐January 1881, at age 52. In this short piece, Ibsen describes his earliest childhood memories ...