Elaborative Reminiscing Research Articles

The Key to Successful Social Interactions

Autobiographical memory (ABM) is memory for past personal experiences and is foundational to the development of many cognitive processes. As such, ABM and social learning are developmentally intertwined and functionally dependent, and impairments in each are well-documented in autism. Evidence suggests that elaborative reminiscing (ER) causally and positively impacts neurotypical children’s ABM and social learning. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a new caregiver-mediated ABM intervention that adapts the principles of ER in ways that align with best practices for supporting social learning in autistic children. Participants were 26 caregiver-child dyads; all children (ages 6–15 years) had a diagnosis of autism. We hypothesized that: (1) caregivers would demonstrate improvements in ER across three phases of study (pre-treatment, post-treatment, and follow-up) and (2) children would demonstrate improvements in supported and unsupported ABM and social learning. Results indicated that caregivers demonstrated increased elaborativeness at post-intervention, and that this was maintained at follow-up. Additionally, children demonstrated improvements in supported memory and some measures of social learning at post-intervention, and this was maintained at follow-up. Children also showed improvements in unsupported memory at post-intervention; however, this was not maintained. Results suggest that caregivers of autistic children can be trained to use ER, and that ER is associated with the development of supported memory in autistic children across a wide range of ages. Clinical applications include supporting social learning and connection in autism using ER.

The Social Validity of a Novel Caregiver Intervention to Support Episodic Memory in Autism: A Single-Case Study

Episodic memory (EM) is the content of our personal narratives and is foundational to social communication. Research has repeatedly demonstrated EM challenges in individuals with autism. Meanwhile, it is well documented that a caregiver conversational style known as elaborative reminiscing facilitates EM development in children without autism. This study evaluated the efficacy and social validity of a novel elaborative reminiscing caregiver-mediated intervention to support EM in an 8-year-old girl with autism. Using a mixed-methods approach, we first examined qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate social validity. The caregiver’s subjective impressions of the goals, procedures, and outcomes suggested that the parent training had a high degree of social validity. Second, we evaluated child performance on standard assessments of EM. EM performance measures demonstrated improvements in EM following intervention, suggesting that the caregiver’s subjective impressions of efficacy were rooted in genuine advancements in her child’s EM abilities.

Maternal reminiscing during middle childhood: Associations with maternal personality and child temperament from the Growing Up in New Zealand cohort study.

The way that mothers talk about the past (reminisce) with young children is linked to key memory, language, and socioemotional outcomes. The present research explored the role of a range of child, maternal, socioeconomic, and cultural factors that predict maternal reminiscing style, with a particular focus on maternal personality and child temperament. A total of 1,404 mother-child dyads from the prebirth longitudinal cohort study Growing Up in New Zealand (https://www.growingup.co.nz) participated in a reminiscing task about a negative event when children were 8 years old. This broader cohort is broadly representative of the New Zealand population in terms of maternal ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Conversations were scored using a revised version of the Elaborative Reminiscing Scale. Child temperament during infancy, but not childhood, uniquely predicted maternal reminiscing style. Maternal extraversion also predicted a more elaborative reminiscing style. Other maternal factors, including education, ethnicity, and age, were also identified as unique predictors of maternal reminiscing style. These findings fit well with an ecological systems view of maternal reminiscing as a function of child, maternal, and cultural factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Development of Children’s Autobiographical and Deliberate Memory Through Mother–Child Reminiscing

ABSTRACT Children’s use of appropriate techniques for remembering and the effectiveness of deliberate strategies improve throughout elementary school. However, relatively little is known about the contextual factors that may play a role in the development of these skills as children enter formal school. Building upon findings from the mother – child reminiscing literature, the current study was designed to examine concurrent and longitudinal associations between maternal elaborative reminiscing style, children’s autobiographical memory, and children's deliberate memory skills. Fifty-one children entering kindergarten, drawn from three schools in the Southeastern region of the United States, were assessed with a battery that included tasks for measuring autobiographical memory and deliberate memory. In a parent – child reminiscing task , parent – child dyads discussed two jointly-experienced events, and parents were categorized as higher or lower in their elaborative reminiscing style. The results reveal an association between parents’ reminiscing style and their children’s performance on the Free Recall with Organizational Training Task , in which both spontaneous and trained strategy use and recall are measured. Although elaborative reminiscing style was not associated with children’s spontaneous strategy use or recall performance at school entry, children with higher elaborative mothers displayed higher levels of strategy use and recall scores after training than did children with lower elaborative mothers. These findings highlight linkages between parents’ elaborative style and children’s uptake and successful use of strategic organizational training, underscoring the role that parent – child reminiscing conversations play in the socialization of cognition.

Maternal reminiscing as critical to emotion socialization

BackgroundIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central importance of socioemotional skills in positive child development has become even more apparent. Prevalent models of emotion socialization emphasize the importance of parent-child talk as a critical socialization context. PurposeAutobiographical reminiscing about the child's lived experience may be a particularly effective form of parent-child conversation that facilitates emotion understanding. MethodThe authors provide a theoretical and empirical review of how maternal reminiscing style impacts specifically on emotion socialization in both typically and atypically developing children. ResultsIndividual differences in maternal reminiscing indicate that highly elaborative reminiscing is related to both better narrative skills and higher levels of emotion understanding and regulation both concurrently and longitudinally. Intervention studies indicate that mothers can be coached to be more elaborative during reminiscing and coaching leads to higher levels of emotion understating and regulation. ConclusionsReminiscing about lived experience allows mothers and children to explore and examine emotions in personally meaningful situations that have real world implications for children's evolving emotion understanding.

Maternal Reminiscing and Children’s Socioemotional Development: Evidence from a Large Pre-Birth Longitudinal Cohort Study, Growing Up in New Zealand

ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to explore how maternal reminiscing relates to socioemotional development during middle childhood. Specifically, analyses explored the link between maternal reminiscing and children’s internalizing (emotional problems and peer problems), externalizing (hyperactivity and conduct problems) and prosocial behavior within a large and diverse sample of New Zealand families, after controlling for a range of child and maternal sociodemographic factors. A subset of 1404 mother-child dyads (663 boys) were selected from the longitudinal study Growing Up in New Zealand’s 8-year data collection wave. Mother-child reminiscing conversations about a past negative emotional event were coded using a scale-based measure of maternal elaboration. After controlling for child and maternal sociodemographic characteristics, regression analyses identified unique associations between maternal reminiscing style and children’s concurrent scores on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Overall, greater maternal elaboration was associated with fewer child emotional problems and greater child prosocial behavior. This study presents novel data exploring the importance of mother-child reminiscing interactions at a critical and sensitive time in child development. Future research should explore bidirectional influences across time between mothers’ elaborative reminiscing and children’s socioemotional development.

Exploring the relationship between parent mental health and parent–child emotion reminiscing

ABSTRACT This study examines how parents’ mental health symptoms, emotion regulation and mindfulness relate to parent–child reminiscing conversations about past emotional events. Fifty-four children aged 8–12 years and their parents were recruited from a child psychology clinic (n = 28) and local schools (n = 26). Dyad’s reminiscing conversations were recorded, transcribed, and coded for elaboration style, emotion content and emotion closure. Child language ability and mental health symptoms were measured, as was parent mindfulness, emotion regulation and mental health symptoms. Mindfulness acting with awareness was a unique predictor of dyad emotion closure. Depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms were not directly related to elaborative reminiscing, however, moderation by clinical status revealed a negative relationship for the community children only. These findings suggest a more complex relationship at play between parent and child mental health in reminiscing within clinical populations. Implications of these findings for a growing body of reminiscing interventions are discussed.

Development of a Manualized Intervention to Support Episodic Memory in Autistic Children: Elaborative Reminiscing Is Key

Episodic memory (EM) is memory for past personal experiences. EM and social development are inextricably linked, and both are impacted in autistic persons. Parents of autistic children can be taught to engage in a unique conversational style (i.e., elaborative reminiscing) to support a child's memory and social development. This article discusses the importance of EM in autism and describes a new manualized caregiver training to support EM in autistic children. An uncontrolled pre-post study design was employed to test proof of concept. Results affirmed the potential of this intervention for increasing caregivers' elaborateness and improving children's EM in a family-centered, naturalistic way. Results suggest that further treatment development and examination of effectiveness are needed. We argue that these kinds of intervention are important: not only is EM theoretically potent for social cognitive development, it is essential for a sense of self-determination, social connection, and psychological well-being.

Teaching Elaborative Reminiscing to Support Autobiographical Memory and Relationships in Residential and Community Aged Care Services.

Memories of the past are critically important as we age. For older adults receiving formal care in a range of settings, reminiscing with care staff may provide frequent opportunities for recalling autobiographical memories with a supportive conversational partner. Importantly, prior research suggests that some reminiscing conversations are more supportive than others. In the developmental literature, a long tradition of sociocultural memory research has shown how children’s autobiographical memory is scaffolded and supported by parents during reminiscing, when parents use a particular kind of conversational technique, known as “elaborative reminiscing”. In the current project, we aimed to examine whether we could enhance conversations between staff and older people receiving aged care by teaching care staff about these beneficial conversational techniques and supporting them to reminisce more often with residents/clients. We also aimed to determine whether staff members’ use of elaborative reminiscing techniques was associated with autobiographical memory details recalled by residents/clients during routine conversations. We conducted a workshop with 16 staff within a residential aged care and community care setting. We followed this with a 4-week training-and-feedback period during which staff recorded their conversations with residents and clients. Staff feedback indicated successful use of the scaffolding techniques overall, and benefits as well as barriers to their use in day-to-day practice. Analysis of the conversations demonstrated that the use of particular elaborative reminiscing techniques by staff was associated with increased recall of episodic and semantic autobiographical memory details by residents/clients. Overall, findings suggest that the principles of elaborative reminiscing may apply across the lifespan, and that the benefits of elaborative reminiscing for autobiographical memory may be particularly important in times of cognitive need. Practically, training aged care staff in specific and practical conversational tools can facilitate reminiscing for people receiving aged care.

Growing Memories: Coaching mothers in elaborative reminiscing with toddlers benefits adolescents' turning-point narratives and wellbeing.

Parental elaborative reminiscing supports young children's autobiographical memory, narrative, and socioemotional skills. This study is an adolescent follow-up of a reminiscing intervention in which 115 primary-caregiver mothers of toddlers were randomly assigned to a control group (n=59) or to receive training in elaborative reminiscing (n=56) for the next year. At age 15, 93 of the now-adolescents (81%) were invited to narrate a turning point in their lives and to report on their personality traits and well-being. Turning-point narratives were coded for causal coherence (connections between past events and present self) and thematic coherence (elaboration and resolutions). Adolescents whose mothers were in the intervention group told more causally coherent turning-point narratives and reported fewer emotional problems than control participants, covarying for baseline measures and personality traits. Maternal elaborative reminiscing in early childhood appears to have long-term benefits for adolescents' causal coherence in turning-point narratives and well-being.

Examining Maternal Elaborative Reminiscing as a Protective Factor in the Intergenerational Transmission of Psychopathology.

Most research examining the impact of early parental depression on the developing child has focused on the nature of parenting practices observed in depressed adults. Maternal elaborative reminiscing, or the extent to which mothers elaboratively discuss past shared experiences with their children, has a considerable influence on children's emotional and social development and is understudied within the context of maternal depression. The current study is the first to examine whether maternal elaborative reminiscing in middle childhood mediates the association between exposure to maternal depressive symptoms in infancy and later internalizing and externalizing problems. The study included 206 mother-child dyads recruited from the community who participated in a prospective longitudinal study. Maternal depressive symptoms were assessed when offspring were 6-months old. At 5-years old, dyads were observed during a free play task to measure sensitive and harsh-intrusive parenting and during a reminiscing task to measure maternal elaboration. Teacher-reported internalizing and externalizing problems were collected at age 7. A saturated path model revealed that maternal elaborative reminiscing, but not sensitive or harsh-intrusive parenting, fully mediated the association between maternal depression in infancy and externalizing, but not internalizing, problems. Reduced maternal elaboration during parent-child reminiscing constitutes one way in which risk from early maternal depression is associated with later externalizing problems.

A Micro-Analytic Approach to Parent-Child Reminiscing

The reminiscing literature has for decades highlighted the positive effect of the high elaborative reminiscing style on children’s autobiographical memory. However, very little is known about the direct, reciprocal influences of parents’ and children’s utterances on each other. Using a micro-analytic approach, the current study aimed to investigate a) how likely children were to provide memory information directly following parental elaborative, repetitive, and confirming utterance types, and b) how likely parents were to respond to children’s memory information and verbal placeholders with elaborations, repetitions, and confirmations. Eighty-eight (N = 88) mothers and fathers participated in the study with their 4-year-old children. The micro-analyses revealed that children were most likely to provide memory information directly following parental open-ended elaborative and repetitive questions, and positive confirmations. Thus, through their open-ended questions and confirmations parents promoted the reciprocal, joint process of remembering which appeared highly facilitative of children’s autobiographical remembering.

Autobiographical Memory in Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Hearing Loss, and Childhood Trauma: Implications for Social Communication Intervention.

Purpose Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) work with a variety of populations at risk for poor autobiographical and episodic memory. The purpose of this tutorial is to describe autobiographical memory and how it is affected in children with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, hearing loss, and childhood trauma, as well as provide clinicians with practical strategies for supporting autobiographical memory in each of these clinical populations. Method This tutorial reviews the literature on (a) autobiographical and episodic memory in typical development; (b) its relation to theory of mind, personal narrative skills, and executive functions; (c) elaborative reminiscing in typical development; (d) how autobiographical memory is impaired in children with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, hearing loss, and childhood trauma; and (e) strategies for supporting autobiographical memory in each clinical population. Conclusions When adequately prepared, SLPs are uniquely situated to address autobiographical and episodic memory in their work with children, families, and related professionals. This is a long-overdue focus of such great clinical import that justifies its inclusion in the traditional training and preparation of SLPs. Adapting elaborative reminiscing strategies for use with various clinical populations is promising for facilitating healthy EM development and related cognitive functions.

Longitudinal effects of maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and Reminiscing and Emotion Training on children's diurnal cortisol regulation.

Dysregulation in children's physiological stress systems is a key process linking early adversity to poor health and psychopathology. Thus, interventions that improve children's stress physiology may help prevent deleterious health outcomes. Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) is a brief relational intervention designed to improve maternal caregiving support by enhancing maltreating mothers' capacity to reminisce with their young children. This study evaluated associations between maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and the RET intervention with changes in children's diurnal cortisol regulation across the 1 year following the intervention, and the extent to which improvements in maternal elaborative reminiscing differed between intervention groups and mediated change in children's physiological functioning. Participants were 237 children (aged 36 to 86 months) and their mothers. Results indicated that the RET intervention was associated with significant positive change in elaborative reminiscing, which was sustained over time. Mothers' elaboration immediately after the intervention served as a mediator of RET's effects on improvements in children's diurnal cortisol regulation (steeper diurnal slopes) from baseline to 1 year following intervention. This suggests RET is effective in facilitating physiological regulation among maltreated children.

Maternal Reminiscing Is Associated With Preschoolers' Reports of Maltreatment During Forensic Interviews.

Children's reports during forensic interviews regarding maltreatment allegations are often critical for legal processes and for guiding decisions regarding services for children and their families. Field research examining forensic interviews with children has identified a wide range in the amount of information children report to interviewers. Research examining associations between children's forensic reports and their broader ecological and developmental contexts related to autobiographical memory would critically contribute to our understanding of children's reports of trauma during forensic investigations. Guided by the sociocultural theory of autobiographical memory development and a self-determination perspective of interviewing child witnesses, associations between the number of allegation-relevant details reported by 52 preschoolers (M = 4.59 years old, SD = 1.06) during forensic interviews concerning substantiated maltreatment allegations and later maternal elaborative and autonomy supportive reminiscing from observations of mother-child interactions during a laboratory assessment were examined. Consistent with previous research regarding children's autobiographical memory, a positive association between maternal elaborative reminiscing about everyday experiences with their children and the number of unique allegation-relevant details children reported during forensic interviews was observed, but only when mothers reminisced with their children in an autonomy supportive manner. Theoretical and practical implications for interviewing child witnesses are discussed.

Elaborative Reminiscing and Child Receptive Language in the Context of Maltreatment: The Moderating Role of Maternal Sensitivity.

This study investigated whether the effect of maternal elaborative reminiscing on child language is moderated by maternal sensitivity and whether this association depends on children's experience of maltreatment. A total of 236 mothers and their 3- to 7-year-old children (mean age = 5 years) were observed interacting with experimenter-provided toys in the lab and at home, and maternal sensitivity was coded from these interactions. Of that, 155 of the children had a history of maltreatment with the mother being named a perpetrator, and the remaining dyads were demographically matched with no history of maltreatment. Dyads were also asked to discuss four past emotional events, and these conversations were coded for maternal elaborative reminiscing. Children and mothers participated in an assessment of receptive language. Findings revealed an unqualified positive main effect of elaborative reminiscing on children's receptive language in the nonmaltreating families. However, for maltreated children, elaborative reminiscing was only associated with higher child receptive language when mothers were also more sensitive. These findings indicate that, in the context of maltreatment, both elaborative reminiscing and more general aspects of the quality of the parent-child relationship are important for facilitating child receptive language.

Maternal reminiscing and child autobiographical memory elaboration: A meta-analytic review.

Significant research has investigated the relationship between mother-child reminiscing and children's autobiographical memory development. It has been suggested that mothers who adopt a high elaborative reminiscing style tend to have children who provide greater memory elaboration during joint reminiscing, yet the empirical findings are somewhat mixed. To address this issue, a systematic review and meta-analyses were conducted to investigate the relationship between maternal elaborative reminiscing and child autobiographical memory elaboration. Thirty-four cross-sectional and longitudinal studies from peer-reviewed journals and published dissertations were included in the review. Of those, 31 studies had available data for meta-analytic analyses of the maternal reminiscing variables identified in the review. Findings from this study provided strong evidence indicating that high elaborative maternal reminiscing was associated with children's ability to provide greater detailed personal memory, both concurrently and longitudinally. Among maternal elaborative reminiscing elements identified, mothers' open-ended elaboration and positive evaluation were found to be most related to child memory elaboration. More research is needed to identify the effects of sociocultural contexts on the relationship between maternal elaborative reminiscing and child memory elaboration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring Parents’ Elaborative Reminiscing: Differential Links of Parents’ Elaboration to children’s Autobiographical Memory and Socioemotional Skills

ABSTRACTParents’ elaboration plays an important role in autobiographical memory and socioemotional development. Two types of coding approaches have been used to assess parents’ elaboration: a frequency-based coding (absolute frequencies of different types of elaborative utterances) and a scale-based coding (a 5-point scale based on relative frequencies of types of questions). We examined whether these two coding approaches were related and whether they were differentially associated with child autobiographical memory and socioemotional skills. Sixty-eight preschoolers (M = 50.32) reminisced about positive and negative past events, with their parents and with a researcher. Parents’ elaboration was assessed using the frequency- and scale-based coding approaches. Child autobiographical memory and emotion references were assessed in shared recall (parent–child conversations). Child autobiographical memory was also assessed in independent recall (researcher-child conversations). Child emotion regulation was assessed using the Challenging Situation task. The two coding approaches were moderately related. Parents’ elaboration was related to child autobiographical memory and emotion references in shared recall, regardless of the coding approach. Whereas the frequency-based coding was uniquely related to child memory in the independent recall, the scale-based coding was uniquely related to child emotion regulation. Implications of using diverse coding approaches to understand the role of parents in child development are discussed.

Maternal Elaborative Language in Shared Emotion Talk with ODD Children: Relationship to Child Emotion Competencies.

While maternal elaborative reminiscing has been found to be positively connected to children's emotion competencies, little is known about how the quality of maternal talk during mother-child talk about shared emotion events relates to emotional competencies in children with disruptive behavioural disorders. In this study of 68 four to eight year-olds with oppositional defiant disorder and 34 children without a diagnosis there was no evidence of differences between mothers of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) children and mothers of non-ODD children in their use of emotion descriptors and open-ended questions when discussing emotion events with their child. After controlling for child age, gender, expressive verbal abilities and number of conversational turns, the more the mothers used these devices the poorer child's ability to generate causes for emotions and the lower the child's emotion regulation ability. The association for child emotion regulation was moderated by child's diagnostic status with a notable relationship for ODD mother-child dyads but not for the other group. The implications of the findings for the conceptualisation of mother-child talk and its relationship to the development of emotion competencies in children with disruptive behavioural problems are discussed.

Latino Families Engage in Elaborative Conversations: Effects on Children’s Recall and Vocabulary

This study examined whether training Latina mothers, during a home visiting program, to engage in elaborative reminiscing (ER) with their preschool-aged children would lead to improvements in their children’s recall of events and vocabulary. Three-year-old children and their mothers were randomly assigned to an ER group or an active control group. During a 4-month period, mothers in the ER group used strategies to elicit personal narratives from their child. Over the same period, mothers in a control group engaged in games and activities with their child. At the 4-month posttest, mothers who participated in ER asked fewer closed-ended questions about a past event than controls (Cohen d = 0.49). Their children’s personal narratives included more descriptive and nonverbal enactment event details than the control children (ds ranged from 0.53 to 0.56). A year later, children in the ER group had significantly higher receptive English vocabulary scores than controls (d = 0.83). The possibility for transfer of mothers’ ER strategies to book reading was also examined, but no significant effects were found. Results support the feasibility and benefits of an elaborative conversations intervention for Latino parents and children. Gains in children’s narrative skills were consistent with prior research in which Latino families construct stories in culturally specific ways.