Download Elaborating on Elaborations: Role of Maternal Reminiscing Style in

Child Development, November/December 2006, Volume 77, Number 6, Pages 1568 – 1588
Elaborating on Elaborations: Role of Maternal Reminiscing Style in Cognitive
and Socioemotional Development
Robyn Fivush
Catherine A. Haden
Emory University
Loyola University Chicago
Elaine Reese
University of Otago
Initial research on maternal reminiscing style established clear and consistent individual differences that vary
along a dimension of maternal elaboration and that are related to children’s developing autobiographical skills.
More recent research has linked maternal elaborative reminiscing to strategic memory development, language
and literacy skills, developing attachment relationships, and understanding of self, other, and mind. In this
review, this research is placed in theoretical context by arguing for the critical role of reminiscing in developmental process and outcome.
A fundamental assumption in developmental
psychology is that parent – child interactions more
generally, and parent – child conversations more
specifically, are instrumental in developmental process and outcome. This idea is rooted in multiple
theoretical formulations, but most especially in
sociocultural theory as articulated by Vygotsky
(1978). Vygotsky argued that all developmental skills
begin first on the interpersonal plane, in interactions
between parents (or other more competent members
of society) and novice children. Children’s lives are
organized such that the activities in which children
are encouraged to engage are those that the culture
deems important, and it is through participation in
culturally mediated, socially structured activities
that children learn the skills necessary to become
competent members of their culture. With time, as
children engage in adult-guided activities, they inOrder of authorship is alphabetical. This paper was written
while the first author was a senior fellow in the Center for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University, sponsored by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions
expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily
reflect the views of The Pew Charitable Trusts. The second author’s work on this paper was supported by a Loyola University
Chicago research stipend award. The third author’s work on this
paper was supported by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of
New Zealand and by the National Institutes of Health (R01
HD044125). We are grateful to the many colleagues and students
who have worked on this research with us over the years, and
especially to Katherine Nelson, whose theoretical vision continues
to frame our work.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Robyn Fivush, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected].
ternalize the skills initially displayed by others and
add them to their own intrapersonal repertoire.
Thus, sociocultural theory identifies social interaction, and especially language interaction, as a
mechanism, or more appropriately a process, of development. Furthermore, sociocultural approaches
emphasize individual differences, such that variations in the quantity and quality of specified forms
of social interaction are expected to result in differences in developmental outcome.
Sociocultural Perspectives on Reminiscing
In our research, we have adapted Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory to examine and understand the
emergence and development of children’s autobiographical memory skills (see for full theoretical details, Fivush, 1991; Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 1996;
Nelson, 1996; Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Reese, 2002a).
Telling and sharing one’s personal past is a culturally
mediated activity that is more or less valued by
particular cultures, and particular members within a
culture. In Western culture, having and telling one’s
autobiography is highly valued (McAdams, 2001;
Pillemer, 1998), and is incorporated into the everyday activities in which children and adults are expected to engage. By participating in parent-guided
reminiscing, children are learning the forms and
functions of talking about the personal past.
Our initial research established individual differences in the ways in which mothers engaged their
r 2006 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2006/7706-0006
Maternal Reminiscing Style
preschool children in talk about the past and, from
these data, the concept of maternal reminiscing style
emerged. Mothers who are more elaborative in
reminiscing with their preschool children about
personally experienced events have children who
develop more sophisticated autobiographical memory skills. Following our initial work in this area, the
importance of maternal elaborative reminiscing style
for children’s developing skills for remembering has
been replicated in multiple studies of autobiographical memory, both in our own labs and in those
of others (see Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Reese, 2002a,
for reviews).
More recently, the construct of maternal elaborative reminiscing style has been examined within social and emotional contexts, in which the focus is on
children’s developing attachment relationships, and
understanding of mind, self, and emotion. However,
in many of these studies the linkages between reminiscing and social and emotional development are
not made explicit, thus detaching the concept of
maternal elaborative style from its initial theoretical
base in autobiographical memory. Given the
wide incorporation of maternal reminiscing style
across a broad array of developmental studies and
domains, the purpose of this essay is to provide a
historical and theoretical context for the construct
of maternal reminiscing style. More specifically, as
more developmental researchers studying different
aspects of development, including memory, language, attachment, theory of mind, emotion, and
self, are beginning to use mother – child talk
about the past as a methodology, we believe it is
critical to provide a clear understanding of maternal
reminiscing style, and to explicate why talk about
the past is particularly influential in developmental
outcome.
Several issues must be noted at the outset. First,
within the research on memory and narrative, maternal reminiscing style as we define it here is only
one way in which mother – child talk about the past
has been conceptualized. Our focus is on the use of
an elaborative style, in which mothers provide a
great deal of rich embellished information and encourage their children to participate in the co-construction of a narrative about the past through openended questions and evaluations. There has been
substantial research focused on other aspects of
mother – child talk about the past, including the
ways in which mothers use specific linguistic and
narrative devices such as orientations, temporal and
causal language, linguistic referential markers, and
quoted speech (e.g., Ely, Gleason, Narasimhan,
& McCabe, 1995; Fivush, 1991; Haden, Haine, &
1569
Fivush, 1997; Minami & McCabe, 1995; Peterson,
Jesso, & McCabe, 1999; Peterson & McCabe, 1992,
1994, 1996, 2004; Peterson & Roberts, 2003). This research has been instrumental in both displaying the
complexity of narrative development and demonstrating socialization of narrative skills. However, in
this review we focus on the use of elaborations as a
specific narrative style because it has been shown to
be critical in the development of children’s abilities
to narrate their personal experiences and, more
important, because maternal elaborative style has
been incorporated into the larger developmental
literature.
Second, from our perspective, and consistent with
the Vygotskian notion of development as a dialectical process, maternal reminiscing style is conceptualized as both a ‘‘cause’’ and an ‘‘effect.’’ Maternal
reminiscing style is part of an ongoing developmental process, in which mothers and children
mutually influence and accommodate to each other.
Thus, our view of development is focused on the
process of interaction. The developmental mechanism of change from this perspective is language
interaction (Nelson, 1996); as children participate in
linguistically scaffolded interactions, in which specific skills and content are co-constructed, children
internalize these interactions, such that what begins
as socially mediated becomes part of the individual’s
repertoire.
Third, because sociocultural theory focuses on the
types of social interactions in which children are
expected and encouraged to engage, understanding
how social activities are organized by underlying
values and belief systems is critical. Whereas some
aspects of development may be universal (e.g., all
normally developing human beings are able to
recall specific episodes from their past), the extent to
which reminiscing is an activity that is valued
and practiced will influence the quantity and quality
of developmental outcome (e.g., the form and
content of a life story). To date, the majority of
research on maternal reminiscing style has focused
on White middle-class Western mothers with
their preschool children. That we find individual
differences in reminiscing style in such a relatively
homogeneous group is interesting in and of itself.
However, we acknowledge the need for research
with more diverse SES and cultural populations,
as well as the inclusion of other caregivers
(fathers, siblings, grandparents) and with older
children. We include this research in our review
when available, and return to the need for
more research along these lines at the end of the
paper.
1570
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
Maternal Reminiscing Style in Historical Context
Early Memory Research
Early research on memory development stemmed
from either a Piagetian (Piaget & Inhelder, 1973) or
an information-processing perspective (Kail & Bisanz, 1982). Although differing in many underlying
assumptions, both approaches share a focus on how
age-related changes in performance are driven by
forces that are internal to the child (e.g., schema
development, processing capacity). Both approaches
emphasize the development of deliberate memory,
and the ways in which children implement various
strategies (e.g., rehearsal, organization) in an effort to
learn and recall information. Moreover, both approaches characterized early memory as somewhat
disorganized and fragmented.
This conceptualization of early memory was
challenged in 1979, when Nelson and Gruendel
published a seminal article on children’s generalized
event representations. They argued that, although
preschool children performed poorly when asked to
remember lists of words or pictures in tasks requiring deliberate strategic interventions, preschoolers’
memory was quite good for familiar and recurring
events. In fact, Nelson and her colleagues demonstrated that preschool-aged children form temporally organized, generalized event representations, or
scripts, for events such as going grocery shopping or
baking cookies, as well as detailed memories of
specific distinctive experiences (see Nelson, 1986, for
an overview). This work dramatically changed the
picture of preschoolers’ memory from one of ‘‘deficiencies’’ to one of surprising competencies.
Mother – Child Narratives About the Past
In order to examine the emergence of early
memory competency, several theorists turned to
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory. In particular, Ratner
(1980, 1984) and Rogoff (1990) argued that maternal
talk was instrumental in children’s developing ability to encode and retrieve information. Rogoff (1990)
demonstrated that mothers who helped their children organize material to be recalled in traditional
list learning memory tasks had children who subsequently recalled more on their own. Similarly,
Ratner (1980, 1984) found that mothers who asked
their children more memory questions in the course
of everyday conversations had children who displayed better memory skills on a variety of recall and
recognition tasks.
It was against this backdrop that we began our
research on mother – child talk about the past. Ex-
tending Vygotskian theory, we argued that children
were learning the forms and functions of talking
about the past within adult-guided reminiscing.
Certainly, the developing ability to recall the past is
complex, and relies on multiple developmental
processes (for reviews, see Cowan, 1997; Nelson &
Fivush, 2004). Our focus, however, was on the developing ability to recall coherent narratives about the
personal past, a skill that is arguably culturally and
socially mediated. Narratives move beyond simply
reporting on what happened, to include information
that places the event in spatial and temporal context,
and that evaluates the event in terms of what it
means for the self (Bruner, 1990; Fivush & Haden,
1997; Pillemer, 1998). Autobiographical recall, in
addition to involving the simple reporting of details
about a past event, places the event in a coherent
framework that explains how and why events happened as they did, and what these events mean for
the self both as a continuous being in time and in
relation to others (Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2004;
Fivush, 2001; Fivush & Haden, 2005; Fivush & Nelson, in press; Pillemer, 1998). As such, autobiographical narratives are linguistically structured cultural
constructs of what is appropriate to recall about one’s
self, and how to report it. We were interested in
examining how these skills were displayed in parentguided conversations about past events and, in turn,
internalized by children as they begin to construct
their own autobiographical narratives.
More specifically, we examined possible individual differences in how parents might scaffold autobiographical reminiscing with their preschool
children. If children are learning autobiographical
memory skills through participating in parent-guided reminiscing, then differences in the ways in
which parents engage in this activity should be reflected in developmental outcome. By establishing
relations between specific aspects of maternal language during reminiscing and resulting aspects of
child performance, we would be able to show the
specific ways in which children are internalizing
skills initially displayed in joint interactions. Thus by
examining mother – child reminiscing in detail, the
developmental process of internalization of autobiographical memory skills could be mapped.
Individual Differences in Reminiscing Style
In our initial research we focused on a homogeneous group of mothers (Euro-American, welleducated, middle-class) because we wanted to
investigate whether individual differences could be
observed in a group that did not vary by other
Maternal Reminiscing Style
factors known to influence verbal interactions. Indeed, we discovered individual differences that
ranged along a dimension of elaboration (Fivush &
Fromhoff, 1988). (We initially labeled mothers as
elaborative versus repetitive, but subsequently
changed this to high versus low elaborative style to
better reflect the finding that virtually all mothers
use elaborations but differ as to the extent to which
they elaborate.) More elaborative mothers discussed
the past with their preschool children in rich detail,
asking many open-ended questions that invited their
children to participate in the conversation. By providing more and more information with each succeeding question, these mothers were engaging their
children in the construction of a story about previously experienced events. In contrast, less elaborative mothers discussed the past with their preschool
children by asking few and redundant questions,
essentially probing for particular pieces of information about the event without providing much in the
way of details to add to the telling.
At about this same time, Hudson (1990) and
McCabe and Peterson (1991) also published findings
indicating comparable variation in mother – child
reminiscing. Similarly, Engel (1986) described
mothers who displayed a ‘‘reminiscing’’ style, characterized by maternal comments that seemed to reflect an interest in simply sharing past events with
their children, in contrast to mothers who displayed
a ‘‘practical remembering’’ style exemplified by the
use of questions about the past to direct behavior in
the present. Although somewhat different in method
and analysis, these studies established remarkably
similar descriptions of the variations in maternal
reminiscing style.
A high elaborative style is defined by the use of
many questions and statements that add new information to the ongoing narrative. Both open-ended
wh-questions (e.g., ‘‘What did we do at the zoo?’’ and
‘‘Who was there with us?’’) and close-ended yes/no
questions (e.g., ‘‘Did we see giraffes at the zoo?’’ and
‘‘Was Daddy with us?’’) can be elaborative if they
include additional information and/or focus on a
new aspect of the event. Highly elaborative mothers
also provide a great deal of evaluative feedback to
their children. By confirming and praising their
children, highly elaborative mothers both encourage
their children’s participation and convey that this
involvement is valued.
Our next question was whether these individual
differences in maternal reminiscing style were related to child outcome. We conducted a longitudinal
study spanning the preschool years (Reese, Haden,
& Fivush, 1993) that, first, replicated the initial
1571
findings of individual differences that varied along
the dimension of elaboration, and, second, documented that mothers were extremely consistent in
their reminiscing style over time. Critically, highly
elaborative mothers would continue to provide additional information about the past event even when
their young children were unable to recall any
information. These mothers also engaged in a great
deal of evaluation of their children’s responses,
providing feedback and affirmation of their children’s participation.
Most important, we demonstrated that highly
elaborative mothers facilitate the development of
autobiographical reminiscing in their preschool
children. Mothers who were highly elaborative early
in development had children who participated more
fully and in more detail in conversations about past
events later in development. Moreover, the direction
of effect was more from mother to child over time
than from child to mother. Mothers who displayed a
highly elaborative style early during their children’s
preschool years had children who developed more
elaborated personal narratives 1 and 2 years later.
Although children did influence their mothers to a
limited extent, children’s own earlier skills were not
related to their later skills.
The finding that mothers who engage in highly
elaborative reminiscing have children who develop
better autobiographical memory skills has now been
widely replicated both in the United States and
cross-culturally, as well as for different types of past
events (e.g., Bauer & Burch, 2004; Farrant & Reese,
2000; Fivush & Vasudeva, 2002; Flannagan, BakerWard, & Graham, 1995; Haden, 1998; Harley & Reese, 1999; Hudson, 1990; Leichtman, Pillemer, Wang,
Koreishi, & Han, 2000; Low & Durkin, 2001; Peterson
et al., 1999; Welch-Ross, 1997, 2001). There is no
doubt that maternal reminiscing style is a stable
characteristic, across time and across siblings within
the same family (Haden, 1998), and that maternal
reminiscing style is a critical factor in children’s
developing autobiographical memory (Nelson &
Fivush, 2004; Reese, 2002a).
Although these findings are robust, one problem
in the literature is that elaboration has been conceptualized in more or less detail across studies. In
our initial conceptualization (Fivush & Fromhoff,
1988), we distinguished elaborative open-ended
questions (wh-questions), elaborative close-ended
questions (yes/no question), and elaborative statements. Each can be argued to serve somewhat different functions in mother – child reminiscing, yet the
majority of subsequent research, including much of
our own, has not differentiated between these types
1572
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
of elaborations. Thus, here, we review the role of
maternal elaborations broadly defined, making more
specific comments about the types of elaborations
when available. We return to this issue in more detail
in a later section.
Our initial interest in autobiographical memory
focused on mother – child reminiscing as a context
within which children would learn skills for remembering that would be specific to autobiographical recall but could conceivably extend to memory
as it is more generally conceptualized (e.g., Ratner,
1984). Furthermore, the focus on narrative suggests
that language would be a critical predictor of mother – child reminiscing as well as an outcome as reflected in children’s developing narrative and
literacy skills (e.g., Snow, 1983). However, reminiscing is not just a cognitive endeavor; in sharing the
past with others, we are creating and maintaining
emotional bonds through the construction of a
shared history (Fivush et al., 1996). By discussing,
evaluating, and interpreting our past we are engaging in self-reflection and understanding; by constructing personal narratives, we are constructing a
sense of self through time, as related to others, yet
each with a unique personal history (Fivush, 2001;
Fivush & Haden, 2005; Fivush & Nelson, in press).
Thus mother – child reminiscing should also develop
from and predict understanding of self, other, and
emotion.
Thus, two broad questions emerged from this
initial research. First, what characteristics of both
mother and child might be related to the level of
maternal elaborative reminiscing, and, second, what
developmental outcomes might be facilitated by
maternal elaborative reminiscing? Each of these
questions is discussed in turn.
Individual Characteristics Related to Maternal
Reminiscing Style
Socioeconomic Status, Culture, and Gender
A great deal of research has demonstrated that
mother – child interactions are influenced by race,
class, culture, and gender (e.g., Heath, 1982; Hoff,
2003), and thus these factors might influence mother – child reminiscing as well. Class differences
have been understudied, and socioeconomic status
and family income have not been assessed directly
(but see Melzi, 2000). However, maternal education,
which is highly correlated with socioeconomic
status, has not been found to be associated with
maternal elaborative reminiscing (Farrant, 2000;
Newcombe & Reese, 2004). Miller and colleagues
(Burger & Miller, 1999; Wiley, Rose, Burger, & Miller,
1998) have presented evidence to suggest that
working-class White mothers are more directive
when reminiscing with their children, and actually
initiate more episodes of past event talk, than middle-class White mothers, who accommodate more to
their children during personal storytelling. This research, however, does not compare directly the level
of elaboration in working-class and middle-class
mothers.
In contrast, a growing body of research points to
cultural differences in autobiographical reminiscing.
The findings are clear: mothers from Western middle-class cultures are on the whole more elaborative
during past event conversations than mothers from
non-Western cultures, such as middle-class Maori
(Hayne & MacDonald, 2003; MacDonald, Uesiliana,
& Hayne, 2000), Korean (Mullen & Yi, 1995), Indian
(Leichtman, Wang, & Pillemer, 2003), and Chinese
(Wang, 2001) families (see Fivush & Haden, 2003, for
a review). From the cultures studied so far, the interpretation has been that Western mothers are more
elaborative because they hold a more independent
notion of self and therefore view reminiscing as important for the child’s developing autobiography or
independent knowledge of self. Evidence in support
of this interpretation is apparent in Wang (2001), in
which Euro-American mothers focused on children’s
personal opinions during reminiscing whereas Chinese mothers focused on reminiscing as a way to
teach moral values. Miller and colleagues (Burger &
Miller, 1999; Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997) also
argued that Euro-American mothers, regardless of
social class, share a goal of autonomous reminiscing
for their children, and they enact this goal by asking
many questions about past events. Thus, Western
mothers are overall more elaborative during reminiscing than mothers from non-Western cultures (but
see Melzi, 2000, for an exception), despite some
social class differences in the type of elaboration.
Gender also plays a role in parent – child reminiscing. Although not all research has found gender
differences, when they do emerge in Western cultures, both mothers and fathers are more elaborative
with daughters than with sons (Fivush, Berlin, Sales,
Mennuti-Washburn, & Cassidy, 2003; Reese, Haden,
& Fivush, 1996). Gender differences in reminiscing
may be expressed differently in non-Western cultures. For instance, Melzi and Fernandez (2004)
found that Peruvian middle-class mothers were
more elaborative about past emotions with their sons
than with their daughters. It should also be emphasized that, at young ages, there are no discernible
Maternal Reminiscing Style
gender differences in children’s ability or willingness
to participate in reminiscing.
If a more elaborated reminiscing style is related
to children’s developing autobiographical memory
skills, then these cultural and gender differences
would suggest that adults, and especially females,
from Western cultures develop more elaborated and
detailed autobiographical memories than adults, especially males, from Eastern cultures, and, indeed,
the research indicates that this is the case (see Fivush
& Haden, 2003; Pillemer, 1998, for reviews).
Maternal and Child Language
Because mother – child reminiscing is clearly a
language-based task, both maternal and child language skills may be related to reminiscing style.
However, across several studies (Hoff-Ginsburg,
1991; Lucariello, Kyratzis, & Engel, 1986; Lucariello
& Nelson, 1987), it was found that mothers who talk
a great deal during free play or caretaking routines
do not necessarily talk a great deal when reading
books together or reminiscing, indicating maternal
elaborative reminiscing style is not a simple measure
of ‘‘talkativeness.’’ Moreover, a highly elaborative
style when reminiscing is not related to a more
conversation-eliciting style during free play (Haden
& Fivush, 1996) or an elaborative style of book
reading (Laible, 2004a). In sum, mothers take different conversational approaches when reminiscing
than when playing, reading, or caregiving with their
children.
With respect to children’s language skills, children
who have more advanced verbal abilities may be
better able to participate in mother-guided reminiscing, leading to higher levels of maternal elaboration.
Indeed, several studies have found mothers to be
more elaborative with young preschoolers who have
higher language skills (Farrant & Reese, 2000; Newcombe & Reese, 2004; Welch-Ross, 1997). However,
this link has not been found in studies conducted
with older preschool children (Reese & Brown, 2000;
Reese et al., 1993). Thus once children attain a certain
threshold, child language skills may no longer be as
important a factor in maternal reminiscing style.
It is also important to note that most mothers become more elaborative as their children grow older
and become more able participants in these interactions (McCabe & Peterson, 1991; Reese et al., 1993).
Critically, mothers maintain their relative standing,
such that mothers who are more elaborative when
their children are young remain more elaborative
than other mothers even as their children grow older
and more linguistically sophisticated (Farrant &
1573
Reese, 2000; Haden, Ornstein, Rudek, & Branstein,
2006; Reese et al., 1993).
Socioemotional Factors
Reminiscing about the past is a social activity that
arguably serves the function of creating and maintaining emotional bonds (Fivush et al., 1996). Thus it
seems likely that social and emotional characteristics
of mothers and children would be related to reminiscing style. This has been assessed in terms of
temperament, self-awareness, and the attachment
status of mother and child.
Temperament. No research to date has examined
relations between maternal reminiscing and maternal personality traits per se, but maternal temperament is not correlated significantly with mothers’
elaborations (Farrant, 2000). However, several studies have found links between maternal elaborative
reminiscing and children’s temperament (usually as
rated by mothers). Mothers are more elaborative
with children rated as more interested and persistent
(Bauer & Burch, 2004), more sociable (Lewis, 1999),
and higher in effortful control (Laible, 2004b). Bird,
Reese, and Tripp (in press) found that parents who
experienced a better fit with their children on a
negative affect temperament dimension were more
elaborative about negative emotions in past event
discussions with their children. Similarly, Laible
(2004a) noted that mothers were more elaborative in
reminiscing when they viewed their children as
higher in negative reactivity. Lewis (1999) also found
that mothers were more elaborative with more active
children. Therefore, the highest levels of elaborative
reminiscing may occur when mothers view their
children as intensely emotional, sociable, moderately
active, and focused. These temperament differences
may coalesce into individual differences in children’s interest in participating in reminiscing. From
a very young age, children who are more attentive
during reminiscing have mothers who ask more
elaborative questions (Farrant & Reese, 2000).
Self-awareness. Most theorists agree that autobiographical memory and self are intimately linked
(Conway et al., 2004), but exactly how remains controversial. Current self-concept influences what is
remembered about the personal past, but what is
remembered about the personal past also helps
shape current self-concept. No research has yet
examined mothers’ self-concept in relation to the
ways in which they talk about past events with their
children, but children’s developing self-awareness
may influence maternal reminiscing style. Early selfawareness is assessed using the mark task (Lewis &
1574
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
Brooks-Gunn, 1979), in which a mark is surreptitiously placed on the child’s nose or forehead. Children who, upon looking in a mirror, direct their hand
to the mark on their own body are said to have
achieved self-recognition.
Children who have more advanced self-awareness
as assessed by the mark task have mothers who
display a more elaborated reminiscing style later in
development (Reese, 2002a). The reason for this link,
however, is unclear, and may not have to do with
children’s self-awareness per se. The mark test appears to tap into a variety of factors, including children’s temperament (Lewis & Ramsay, 1997), which
has already been shown to be related to maternal
elaborative reminiscing. Moreover, these early effects
of child self-awareness on maternal elaboration drop
out by the middle of the preschool years (Reese,
2002a).
Attachment status. Attachment is a foundational
construct in developmental psychology that assesses
the emotional bond between mother and child
(Bowlby, 1969). Children who are the recipients of
sensitive and responsive caregiving develop coherent and consistent internal working models of the
world as a safe place, in which others are loving and
trusted, and these children are securely attached. In
contrast, children who are recipients of insensitive
and/or nonresponsive caregiving will develop less
coherent and consistent internal working models in
which the world is viewed as unsafe, and others as
uncaring and untrustworthy. These children are insecurely attached.
Several theorists have argued that children’s attachment status will influence the type of communication style mothers engage in with their children
(Bretherton & Mulholland, 1999; Thompson, 2000).
In particular, dyads with securely attached children
are hypothesized to be able to engage in open, fluent
and emotionally expressive communication to a
greater extent than dyads with insecurely attached
children. Similarly, maternal attachment status
should be related to mothers’ ability to engage in
more elaborated and coherent reminiscing (Main,
Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2002).
Few studies have assessed maternal attachment
status and reminiscing. Using the Adult Attachment
Interview (AAI), Reese (2005) found that mothers
who used more metacognitive monitoring (e.g., ‘‘I
used to be quite angry about his death, but lately I’ve
been thinking that he wouldn’t want me to feel that
way.’’) were more elaborative in shared past event
conversations with their children. Metacognitive
monitoring is an indicator of a secure orientation
toward one’s early attachment experiences (Main
et al., 2002). In contrast, using a questionnaire measure
of adult romantic attachment, Fivush and Sales (2006)
found that more insecurely attached mothers engaged
in more elaborated reminiscing about a highly traumatic event than did more securely attached mothers.
On the other hand, several studies have assessed
children’s attachment status, and find that mothers
are more elaborative when reminiscing with children
who are securely attached (Fivush & Vasudeva, 2002;
Laible, 2004a; Reese & Farrant, 2003). Specifically,
mothers are more elaborative about the emotional and
evaluative aspects of past events with securely attached children (Farrar, Fasig, & Welch-Ross, 1997;
Laible & Thompson, 2000; Newcombe & Reese, 2004),
particularly for negative emotions (Laible, 2004a).
Mothers of securely attached children are also more
adept at adjusting to children’s growth in memory
abilities over time by increasing their levels of elaboration accordingly (Reese & Farrant, 2003). Intriguingly, Newcombe and Reese (2004) found essentially
no maternal accommodation to children’s increased
responding when children were insecurely attached.
Maternal responsiveness may be a function of maternal sensitivity to children’s social, linguistic, cognitive, and emotional development. Mothers who
are more sensitive may respond with a more or less
elaborative style, depending on children’s characteristics.
Summary
In summary, there is a paucity of research concerning maternal characteristics that may be associated with reminiscing style, and in these limited
studies few or conflicting relations have been found.
More research has focused on relations between
child characteristics and maternal reminiscing style,
and have found, in general, that mothers are more
elaborative with girls, with children who have better
linguistic skills, who have a more persistent and
sociable temperament, and who are more securely
attached. However, it must be noted that several
studies examining child gender and child temperament find no such relations, or the differences varied
as a function of culture (Melzi & Fernandez, 2004).
The extent to which differences in children’s age or
different assessment strategies account for these
inconsistencies is not clear.
Critically, even when child characteristics are related to maternal reminiscing style, it remains the
case that maternal reminiscing style uniquely predicts children’s autobiographical memory, even after
children’s language, temperament, self-awareness,
and attachment status have been taken into account
Maternal Reminiscing Style
(Farrant & Reese, 2000; Reese, 2002a, 2002b). These
patterns indicate that maternal reminiscing style
is not a simple response to child characteristics.
Moreover, maternal reminiscing style does not simply predict children’s ability or willingness to verbally report events; more highly elaborative mothers
seem to help their children to construct more elaborated representations of events. Notably, McGuigan
and Salmon (2004) found that adults’ elaborative
reminiscing benefited children’s nonverbal memory
as well as their verbal memory, suggesting that
elaborative reminiscing is producing changes at the
level of representation, and not just a richer reporting
style (see also Tessler & Nelson, 1994). Furthermore,
studies that train mothers to be more elaborative
during reminiscing demonstrate benefits for children’s memory narratives regardless of children’s
initial language levels or other characteristics (Peterson et al., 1999). Thus it seems clear that maternal
reminiscing style is formative in children’s developing autobiographical memory skills. But is maternal
reminiscing style also instrumental in the acquisition
of other cognitive and socioemotional skills?
Maternal Reminiscing Style and
Developmental Outcomes
Strategic Memory
Strategic memory refers to the use of specific
mnemonic techniques, such as rehearsal and organization, to intentionally prepare for a future assessment of memory. Memory for events and deliberate
memory are routinely treated in fairly distinct literatures (see, e.g., Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Schneider &
Bjorklund, 1998), although both can be analyzed in
terms of the conditions that affect the encoding,
storage, and retrieval of information. It is also possible to view event memory as an amalgam of incidental and deliberate memory, with information
encoded without the intent to remember, but deliberate behaviors clearly in operation at the level of the
telling of the narrative (Ornstein, Haden, & Elischberger, 2006). Moreover, both event memory and
deliberate memory require the activation of processes that are under the control of the child, as in
directed memory searches, carefully constructed
narrative reports, or strategies such as rehearsal, and
to a considerable extent, mother – child reminiscing
may affect children’s acquisition of these skills.
In support of this view, Haden, Ornstein, Eckerman, and Didow (2001) found that 30-month-old
children who reported many elaborative details when
1575
interviewed about events that they had experienced
with their mothers subsequently demonstrated high
levels of recall of objects in a deliberate memory task
as much as a year later, when they were 42 months
of age. The children’s performance on the object
memory task at 42 months was also related to their
mothers’ mental term use during reminiscing when
their children were 30 months old. Children who at
30 months were exposed to more talk about mental
processes, including the processes involved in remembering, during conversations about past events
were later shown at 42 months to be better at a deliberate task that required that they deploy a range of
mnemonic strategies to insure subsequent object recall (Rudek & Haden, 2005). Rudek (2004) further
assessed mother – child reminiscing and children’s
deliberate memory at 42, 54, and 60 months of age,
and found that maternal elaborativeness during
reminiscing was concurrently and longitudinally
associated with children’s strategic behaviors and
recall of sets of to-be-remembered objects. In particular, maternal elaborations were strongly linked to
children’s naming of objects during the study period
in the object memory task, which, in turn, was highly
related to the children’s object recall. Thus a small
number of recent studies support the notion that
maternal elaborative reminiscing is related to, and
may set the stage for, children’s developing competencies in deliberate planning to remember.
Language and Literacy
One way in which reminiscing differs from other
adult – child conversations is in the degree to which
talk is decontextualized from immediate experience.
During a conversation about the past, the adult is
inviting the child to discuss an internal representation (a memory) as opposed to an object, an ongoing
event, or even an external representation such as a
picture. Snow (1983) proposed that adult – child decontextualized talk is critical for children’s advanced
language and literacy skills. Indeed, Reese and
colleagues (Reese, 1995; Sparks, Reese, & Kalia, 2005;
Srivastava, Reese, & Newcombe, 2004) have observed that maternal elaborative reminiscing is related to children’s later print concepts across several
diverse samples. Moreover, this link has been confirmed in experimentally controlled training studies.
Reese, Stewart, and Newcombe (2003) demonstrated
the benefits of training mothers to use an elaborative
reminiscing style on boys’ language skills and on
low-SES children’s print skills, and Peterson et al.
(1999) found benefits of maternal elaborative reminiscing for low-income children’s language and
1576
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
narrative skills. A highly elaborative maternal reminiscing style appears to benefit children’s complex
language and literacy skills, as well as their memory
abilities. Such results are consistent with the view
that because of the ‘‘cognitive distancing’’ (Sigel,
1993) from the immediate environment that is involved in reminiscing, and therefore the relatively
high cognitive and linguistic demands placed on the
child in this task, conversations about shared past
events between parents and children can foster the
sorts of narrative skills emphasized in formal
schooling.
Understanding of Mind
During the preschool years, children develop a
relatively sophisticated understanding of mind that
includes notions of internal representations of beliefs, cognitive processes and states, and emotions
(see Wellman, 2002, for a review). Children begin to
understand that they and other people have an internal life, and that this internal life is unique to the
individual’s experiences. A great deal of research
has established that mother – child conversations,
broadly conceived, are critical in children’s developing understanding of mind (for recent reviews, see
Carpendale & Lewis, 2004; Symons, 2004), but the
specific role of reminiscing has not been fully considered in this literature. In most research on internal
state talk, distinctions are not made between whether
mothers are talking about internal states in the
present or in the past. We argue that this distinction
is critical. It is internal states that link our past to our
present, that make our past experiences important
and meaningful, and that provide continuity of self
across time (Fivush, 2001; Fivush & Nelson, in press),
and mother – child reminiscing about internal states
may help make these links explicit.
Understanding mental states. Much of the research
on children’s developing understanding of their own
and others’ mental states has been conducted within
the ‘‘theory-of-mind’’ paradigm. Typically, children’s
theory of mind is measured with a false belief task, in
which the child learns the true location of an object
but a story character or a friend has false information
about the object’s location (Wimmer & Perner, 1983).
The child is then asked where the character or friend
will think the object is. Children pass the false belief
test when they correctly answer that the character or
friend will act on their false belief by looking in the
incorrect location. Another measure of children’s
understanding of mind is the extent to which they
understand how knowledge is gained (e.g., through
seeing or hearing; Pillow, 1989).
Reminiscing may be particularly critical in helping
children to understand that mental states exist over
time, and continue to influence current behavior. By
relating the past in elaborated and detailed ways,
mothers may be helping their children construct
more detailed representations of past events that
may, in turn, help children link previous mental
states to current internal states and behaviors. Indeed, mothers who are more elaborative during
reminiscing have children with a more advanced
understanding of mind (Reese & Cleveland, 2006;
Welch-Ross, 1997). Related to this, mothers who talk
more about mental states during reminiscing have
children who come to talk more about their own past
mental states later in development (Rudek & Haden,
2005), suggesting that children are learning how to
describe their own and others’ mental states, both
past and present, in the context of mother – child
reminiscing.
Understanding emotion. Within mental states more
broadly defined are emotions. Emotions may be
particularly critical in children’s developing understanding of self and other, as emotions provide an
evaluative link between past and present. Maternal
reminiscing about emotions seems to be linked to
child gender. Although not all research finds gender
differences, when they do emerge, it is in the direction that mothers are more elaborative when discussing past emotional experiences with girls than
with boys (Fivush, 1998; Fivush et al., 2003; Reese et
al., 1996; but see Melzi & Fernandez, 2004, for differing results by culture), and they are more evaluative, use more emotion words, and focus more on
relationships when reminiscing with girls than with
boys (see Fivush & Buckner, 2003, for a review).
When past event conversations focus on specific
emotions, parents are more elaborative with girls
about sadness (Fivush, 1991, 1998; Fivush, Brotman,
Buckner, & Goodman, 2000) and with boys about
anger (Bird & Reese, 2006; Fivush, 1998). By the end
of the preschool years, girls are providing more
elaborated and more emotionally rich narratives of
their personal past than are boys (Buckner & Fivush,
1998), and continue to do so through adulthood
(Bauer, Stennes, & Haight, 2003).
Mothers also seem to be more elaborative when
discussing highly negative events as compared to
positive events (Ackil, Van Abbema, & Bauer, 2003;
Sales, Fivush, & Peterson, 2003). More specifically,
mothers ask more open-ended elaborative questions,
requiring children to provide information, when
discussing negative experiences, but more closedended elaborative questions, requiring children only
to confirm, when discussing positive experiences.
Maternal Reminiscing Style
Mothers also discuss causes more when reminiscing
about negative than positive events. This may indicate that mothers are more concerned with helping
their children to recall a coherent account of negative
events that may help them to understand how and
what happened, whereas reminiscing about positive
events may reflect a focus on creating a shared history (Fivush et al., 2003; Sales et al., 2003) and fostering children’s self-esteem (Reese, Bird, & Tripp, in
press). Indeed, mothers who elaborate more when
discussing emotionally negative past events have
children with more advanced emotional understanding and conscience development (Laible,
2004b, in press). Mothers who elaborate and explain
emotions more when reminiscing about stressful
events have preadolescent children who show more
effective coping strategies and fewer internalizing
and externalizing behavior problems (Fivush &
Sales, 2006; Sales & Fivush, 2005).
There are also cultural differences in mother –
child emotional elaboration during reminiscing.
Euro-American mothers are more elaborative and
evaluative overall when reminiscing about emotions
with their preschool children than are Chinese
mothers, and they focus on causes and resolutions of
emotional experiences more than Chinese mothers
(Fivush & Wang, 2005; Wang, 2001; Wang & Fivush,
2005). These patterns suggest that Euro-American
mothers are more concerned with helping their
preschool children to understand and regulate their
emotions than are Chinese mothers. Indeed, by early
childhood, American children are more advanced in
their emotional understanding than their Chinese
age-mates (Wang, 2003).
Finally, there are a growing number of studies to
suggest that mothers of securely attached children
are more emotionally elaborative during reminiscing
than mothers of insecurely attached children. Securely attached dyads reminisce more about emotion
overall, and they elaborate on past emotional experiences to a greater extent than do insecurely
attached dyads (Laible, 2004b; Oppenheim, Nir,
Warren, & Emde, 1997). As discussed earlier, elaborated reminiscing both maintains and extends secure attachment relationships (Fivush & Reese,
2002). Mothers who are more elaborative during
emotional reminiscing facilitate the development of
emotional understanding and regulation in their
children (Laible, 2004a, 2004b). Most important,
reminiscing plays a unique role in children’s developing understanding of emotion. Laible (2004b, in
press) directly compared maternal elaborations in
the context of reminiscing and storybook reading,
and found that only maternal elaborative reminis-
1577
cing predicted children’s later emotional understanding.
Understanding self. Through reminiscing, children
begin to build a sense of the self in the past, and how
past self relates to current self, creating a temporally
extended self through time. A temporally extended
self relies on more than knowing that one engaged in
specific activities and events in the past. A temporally
extended self requires a sense of self as a continuous
being, with continuous thoughts and emotions that
link past to present and into the future; essentially a
temporally extended self relies on a notion of a
temporally extended mind (Fivush, 2001; Fivush &
Nelson, 2006; Moore & Lemmon, 2001; Nelson, 2001).
The existing evidence does indicate a link between
maternal elaborative reminiscing specifically about
emotions, and children’s self concept. Welch-Ross,
Fasig, and Farrar (1999) found that mothers who
elaborated more about emotions during reminiscing
had children with more coherent self-concepts. Bird
and Reese (in press) also found that mothers who
explained negative emotions in a more elaborative
way had children with more consistent self-concepts.
Critically, Reese, Bird, and Tripp (in press) examined
mothers’ elaborations on negative emotions when
discussing ongoing conflicts with their children
compared to reminiscing about past negative emotions. Maternal elaborations about emotions during
reminiscing more strongly predicted children’s selfconcept than did maternal elaborations about ongoing conflicts.
Summary
Research supports a clear relation between maternal elaborative reminiscing and children’s
memory, language, and literacy development. An
expanding body of research further supports relations between maternal reminiscing style and children’s understanding of mind. However, there are
still many limitations to this research that must be
addressed in future studies. Most important, because
most of the research examining relations between
mother – child conversations and various aspects of
children’s understanding of mental states, emotions,
and self has not made a distinction between talk
about the present and talk about the past, it is not
always clear if reminiscing plays a unique role in
children’s development over and above more general conversational style. Recall, however, that
mothers are not consistent in their elaborative style
across different conversational contexts such as free
play, storybook reading, and caregiving routines.
Much of the research on the role of mother – child
1578
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
conversations on children’s understanding of mind
has relied on reminiscing contexts to elicit mother –
child conversations, but have not made this a central
part of their methodology or arguments. The few
studies that have directly compared reminiscing to
other conversational contexts converge on finding
that reminiscing plays a unique role (we return to
why this might be so in the final section). Thus, future research needs to both directly compare different conversational contexts and embed the research
within the theoretical context of maternal reminiscing style per se, in order to elucidate these relations.
Elements of Maternal Elaborative Reminiscing
As mentioned earlier, maternal elaborative reminiscing has been examined in more or less detail across
studies. Whereas it is clear that elaborative reminiscing broadly defined plays an important role in
multiple aspects of developmental outcome, it is
critical to understand that an elaborative reminiscing
style is actually a conglomeration of many elements.
Early in development, mothers elaborate primarily through informational statements (often accompanied by a tag question) and close-ended yes/no
questions, shifting to the use of mostly open-ended,
wh-questions by the end of the preschool years
(Farrant & Reese, 2000; Haden et al., 2006). These
moves seem to reflect maternal sensitivity to the
child’s developing abilities to engage in reminiscing,
with mothers ‘‘upping the ante’’ by asking children
to contribute more as they become more capable of
providing recall. The increasing use of more openended elaborative questions with age helps children
become more active participants in reminiscing.
Open-ended elaborative questions give children a
platform on which to display their event knowledge
in a verbal form. Thus, asking a child ‘‘What did you
like about the zoo?’’ is more likely to produce a
complex linguistic response than the closed-ended
yes/no question ‘‘Did you like the zoo?’’ The act of
putting an experience into words may help children
to represent the event more richly, and may also
work to facilitate children’s retrieval through language at a later date, both for this event as well as
learning more general retrieval skills. In studies in
which elaborative comments have been parsed according to type, the frequency of mothers’ use of
open-ended elaborative questions (Farrant & Reese,
2000), and the greater use of these types of questions
in comparison to elaborative statements (Haden et al.,
2006), predicts children’s later memory responding.
Another critical aspect of an elaborative reminiscing style is mothers’ willingness to confirm and
follow in on children’s responses. The very nature of
an open-ended question, of course, is that it gives the
child options of which aspects of the event to discuss. Maternal elaborations are highly correlated
with confirmations and evaluations of the child’s
response (Bauer & Burch, 2004; Farrant & Reese,
2000; Fivush & Vasudeva, 2002; Reese et al., 1993;
Sales & Fivush, 2005). Highly elaborative mothers
both ask their child to report information and also
provide a great deal of confirming and evaluative
feedback on what their children contribute. Critically, a common form of maternal positive evaluation is
to repeat part or all of what children say; especially
for young children, repeating their contributions both
reinforces their memory and weaves what they recall
into the ongoing co-constructed narrative. Thus
repetitions of child and repetitions of self serve very
different functions in mother – child reminiscing. Repeating the child is an elaborative device for validating the child’s response, whereas repeating the self is
the key element of a less elaborative style in which the
mother simply tries to get her child to recall without
any linguistic or memory support. Thus, highly
elaborative mothers are both providing structure to
the emerging narratives as well as eliciting and
valuing their children’s participation in this process.
Cleveland and Reese (2005) attempted to separate
the effects of elaborative open-ended questioning
from the effects of following in on the child’s perspective on an event, similar to what Grolnick (2003)
has described as autonomy support. Both maternal
elaborations and autonomy support during reminiscing independently predicted children’s memory
responding at younger ages, although maternal autonomy support became a less important factor as
children grew older. Furthermore, mothers’ followins and confirmations, although concurrently correlated with children’s remembering, are not as predictive of children’s long-term remembering as are
mothers’ open-ended questions (Farrant & Reese,
2000), suggesting that confirmations may keep the
child engaged in the current conversation but it
is maternal elaborations that are instrumental in
children’s developing skill set. In line with the
Vygotskian perspective, with children’s increasing
age and skill, elaborative mothers ask their children
to contribute more information when reminiscing.
However, not all elaborative mothers increase in
their use of open-ended questions over close-ended
questions or elaborative statements over time. Some
mothers who may be coded as highly elaborative
actually ask very few questions; they essentially tell
the entire narrative of what happened to the child,
rather than helping the child to co-construct the
Maternal Reminiscing Style
narrative together (Haden et al., 2005). From our
perspective, this form of elaboration would not be
particularly effective as it would neither engage the
child nor help the child to learn through participation. Modeling is not enough; the child must be actively engaged in order to internalize the requisite
skills. Elsewhere, we have argued for the construct
of ‘‘voice’’ in autobiographical narratives (Fivush,
2004). When mothers impose a particular narrative
and perspective on their child, even in highly elaborative ways, children will not develop an authorial
voice in which to narrate their own personal past.
Recent research suggests that mothers who impose
their perspective during reminiscing have children
who are more hostile and disengaged in the task (A.
Raikes, 2005, personal communication).
We also need to consider what specific aspects of
the past event are being elaborated upon. Are
mothers focused on the facts of what happened, or
on the internal states, emotions, dialogue, and reactions of the child and/or other people? As reviewed
here, maternal elaboration on internal states may be
related to children’s developing theory of mind, and
maternal elaborations on emotions, in particular,
may be related to both maternal and child attachment status.
In general, future research needs to take a more
complex look at maternal elaborations, defining and
describing the type of elaboration and what is being
elaborated upon if we are to attain a more finegrained understanding of how maternal reminiscing
style is internalized by children, as well as mapping
more specific relations between maternal reminiscing style and child outcomes. Moreover, we need to
examine developmental differences in how mothers
elaborate and how children respond to this style of
reminiscing in order to gain a more complete picture
of how children are learning multiple developmental
skills through mother – child reminiscing across
development.
Event Talk
Throughout this review, we have argued that to
represent events in memory, children must construct
narratives. Narratives provide the glue that makes
events comprehensible and meaningful (Bruner,
1990; Fivush & Haden, 1997). However, we do not
only talk about events after they have occurred; we
talk about events in preparation for the experience,
and as they are unfolding. Event talk that takes place
prior to and during experiences may facilitate children’s memory, just as narrative reminiscing subsequent to the experience does. For young children,
1579
especially when an event is novel, mother – child
discussion before and during the experience can be
of critical importance in guiding initial encoding and
the establishment of a memory representation that,
in turn, can be maintained, elaborated, and even
modified through subsequent reminiscing (Haden
et al., 2001; Hudson, 2002).
The few studies to date that have examined mother – child talk during an event suggest that preschoolers produce longer and more detailed reports
of these experiences if their mothers use elaborative
wh-questions, and follow-in on, and positively
evaluate their children’s verbal and nonverbal
behaviors as the events were being experienced
(Boland, Haden, & Ornstein, 2003; Ornstein, Haden,
& Hedrick, 2004). Moreover, ‘‘joint’’ linguistic interactions between parents and children during events
are more strongly related to children’s later memory
for the experiences than are interactions characterized as primarily involving mother-only talk, childonly talk, or no-talk (Haden et al., 2001; Tessler &
Nelson, 1994).
Whereas even 3-year-old children show enhanced
recall of experiences as a function of elaborative
discussion with their mothers during events, the facilitative effects of preparatory talk appear to be
more limited (Hudson, 2002). Indeed, consistent
with the view that young children have difficulty
using language alone to organize future experiences
(Nelson, 1996), preparatory talk provided by parents
and other adults seems to be most effective with
older preschoolers when paired with visual displays
such as pictures, storybooks or maps, and when the
adult highlights connections between the future
event and children’s prior knowledge and experiences (Hudson, 2002; McGuigan & Salmon, 2005).
In terms of the relative contributions of talk during and after an event, McGuigan and Salmon (2004)
and Conroy (2006) have experimentally manipulated
the level of elaborative talk an experimenter engaged
in during and after a structured play activity.
Although elaborative talk during the event facilitated subsequent recall, elaborative talk during an
event was not as effective in enhancing preschoolers’
recall as was elaborative talk after the event. Children
who engaged in elaborative reminiscing recalled
more about the event regardless of how the event
was talked about while it was ongoing. However, one
limitation of these experimental studies is that children are being exposed to experimenters’ talk during
a brief time interval, and our arguments about maternal reminiscing style suggest that children develop generalized strategies and styles for recalling
and reporting events gradually over the preschool
1580
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
years through countless mother – child narrative interactions. Related to this, parents may be better able
to focus the conversation around the child’s interests,
and highlight associations between events and the
child’s prior knowledge and experience.
In sum, we do not yet have a full understanding of
how joint conversations that occur prior to, during,
and after an event differentially impact memory.
Theoretically, a consideration of these different forms
of ‘‘event talk’’ marries the traditional information
processing framework for the flow of information
within the memory system with an emphasis drawn
from the sociocultural perspective to examine conversational interactions as mediating the process by
which memory representations are established,
consolidated, retrieved, and reported. It seems important to examine the possibility that talk before,
during, and after events might influence different
aspects of recall, such that talk before and during
an event might primarily affect children’s initial
understanding of the experience, whereas reminiscing might play a larger role in what children remember over the long term. Indeed, the effects of
mother – child talk before, during, and after an experience may be additive, with each of these opportunities for conversation uniquely influencing
aspects of remembering. It is critical to know how
multiple opportunities to talk about an event before,
during, and after its occurrence may quantitatively
and qualitatively change what is remembered, as
well as how maternal styles, both during an event
and in reminiscing, become generalized strategies
for children across the preschool years.
Why Reminiscing Is Critical
Our initial research on maternal reminiscing style
established robust and enduring individual differences in the way in which mothers structure conversations about the past with their preschool
children, and, importantly, these differences are
clearly and consistently related to children’s emerging autobiographical memory skills. Children of
more highly elaborative mothers come to tell more
detailed, more elaborated, and more coherent narratives of their personal past than do children of less
elaborative mothers. Moreover, maternal reminiscing style is context specific, and, although level of
elaboration may be partly a response to specific child
characteristics, maternal reminiscing style uniquely
predicts children’s autobiographical memory development, aspects of strategic memory, literacy and
narrative skills, developing theory of mind, and
understanding of self and emotion. Clearly, maternal
reminiscing style is a powerful influence on multiple
aspects of children’s cognitive and socioemotional
development. Possible reasons why reminiscing
may be a critical developmental context have been
threaded throughout this review; here we weave
these threads together.
First, and most important, reminiscing is a language-based activity. Indeed, we can only share the
past with others through language. Although there
may be physically present cues in the current environment, in order to explicate and expand on what
happened in the past, one must use language. It is
through language that mother and child establish a
shared reference of attention during reminiscing;
language itself becomes an object around which
mother and child interact. Through discussing, negotiating, and constructing a story of what happened,
mother and child are creating a shared reference and
a shared history. Through the linguistic practice of
reminiscing, children are learning how to remember
their past. Language interaction is both the medium
and the mechanism of development (see Nelson,
1996, for a full theoretical discussion).
Moreover, because reminiscing often involves
disagreements and negotiations about what occurred, children are learning that memories are not
necessarily veridical representations of the past, but
rather are subjective representations, in which each
individual may or may not recall specific aspects of
what occurred. This, in turn, facilitates children’s
understanding of memory as a mental representation.
Furthermore, mothers and children do not simply
reminisce about the facts of what happened; they
reminisce about the thoughts and emotions of the
child, the mother, and others. In this way, children
begin to evaluate and interpret the past. The past is
not simply a collection of events that happened; the
past is intimately linked to how one thinks and feels,
and in this way, the past self becomes linked with the
present self. Children begin to build a sense of self as
continuous in time. Self-continuity is not based
solely on remembering what one did in the past; selfcontinuity relies on an extended consciousness
through time. Thus, mother – child reminiscing is a
critical tool in children’s developing understanding
of mind as representational and temporally extended
(Fivush & Nelson, in press).
Furthermore, through participating in these kinds
of negotiations, children are learning that their own
perspective on the past may be unique; others may
view the past differently, and this may facilitate
children’s developing theory of mind. Understanding this unique perspective also helps build a
subjective sense of self as having a specific and
Maternal Reminiscing Style
individual perspective on one’s own past experiences (Fivush, 2001; Fivush & Haden, 2005). Essentially, mother – child reminiscing sets the stage for the
construction of an autobiography, a story about one’s
self that provides an evaluative framework for how
one became the person one is. Finally, reminiscing
not only creates an individual history; it also creates
a shared history. Through reminiscing with others
about shared events, one creates an autobiography
intertwined with others. We are bonded together in
the present because of what we have shared in the
past. Thus mother – child reminiscing is critical for
creating and maintaining emotional bonds (Fivush
et al., 1996).
Obviously, the extent to which individuals engage
in these processes culminating in an elaborated and
subjective perspective on one’s personal past will
vary, and as this review demonstrates, will depend
on gender, culture, individual child characteristics,
and, critically, on maternal reminiscing style. The
ways in which mothers and children engage in
shared reminiscing will be modulated by the values
and belief systems inherent in the larger sociocultural world in which reminiscing is embedded. The
way in which a life is conceptualized, what events,
and aspects of events, are appropriate to report and
share with others (Fivush, 2004; Pillemer, 1998), and
the extent to which having and telling an elaborated
self-history is prized (McAdams, 2001; Pillemer,
1998) will all play a role in the ways in which
mothers will structure reminiscing with their young
children. In cultures that value individualism and
self-determination, mother – child reminiscing focuses on more elaborated accounts of the child’s
actions, desires, thoughts, and emotions. In contrast,
in cultures that value community and self-in-relation, mother – child reminiscing focuses on the communal good and moral lessons (Miller et al., 1997;
Wang, 2001, 2003). Similarly, beliefs and values associated with gender are expressed in mother – child
reminiscing, such that mothers are more emotional,
more evaluative, and more relational with daughters
than with sons, at least in Western cultures (see
Fivush & Buckner, 2003, for a review). And as the
research reviewed throughout this essay has revealed, mothers vary along a dimension of elaboration when reminiscing as a function of multiple
characteristics of mother and child, as well as the
larger family and cultural context (see Fivush &
Haden, 2003, for an overview).
Equally important, mother – child reminiscing is
not a static skill. Although mothers are remarkably
consistent over time and across siblings in the level
of elaboration in comparison to other mothers
1581
(Haden, 1998; Reese et al., 1993), mothers change and
adapt their reminiscing style as a function of their
children’s developing age and skills. However, the
extent to which mothers adapt sensitively and responsively to their children may also differ (e.g.,
Newcombe & Reese, 2004). This brings us back to the
Vygotskian notion of development as a dialectical
process. We do not argue that maternal reminiscing
style causes specific child outcome in a linear fashion;
rather, we argue that maternal and child characteristics influence specific aspects of maternal reminiscing style, which in turn influence specific aspects of
developmental outcome, which in turn influence
aspects of maternal reminiscing style, and so on in a
continuing spiral of developmental process and outcome. Whereas longitudinal research has empirically
demonstrated the unique predictive power of maternal reminiscing style on multiple aspects of child
outcome, we would argue that a more nuanced and
dialectical model of mutual influence would better
capture the reality of the developmental process.
Elaborating on Elaborations: Future Directions
Throughout this essay, we have suggested areas ripe
for future research. We recap these ideas here as they
fit into four major themes. The first theme is how
mothers’ reminiscing style varies as a function of
their own characteristics. This is a huge gap in the
literature. Whereas we know that mothers are consistent in reminiscing style over time and across
siblings, but that mothers differ in the level of elaboration across conversational contexts, we still know
very little about why some mothers are more elaborative in reminiscing than other mothers.
Given the framework provided here, critical areas
for future research include how maternal reminiscing style is linked to mothers’ personality and selfconcept. For example, one might imagine that
mothers high on sociability would be more elaborative in reminiscing, or mothers high in negative affect might elaborate more on emotion. Certainly, we
would expect depressed mothers to reminisce less
overall, and to reminisce in less elaborative ways.
These are just a few possible links, but clearly this
area is wide open for future research. Relations to
maternal attachment also need to be clarified. Theory
suggests that more securely attached mothers should
be more elaborative during reminiscing, especially
about emotionally difficult experiences, but the two
studies examining this question found conflicting
results. Issues of measurement are critical here, as
there are ongoing controversies over narrative versus questionnaire measures of attachment, as well as
1582
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
whether one is assessing maternal representations of
childhood attachment or current romantic partners
(e.g., Shaver & Mikulincer, 2002).
In addition, we have very little information on
how maternal reminiscing style varies as a function
of social class within and across cultures, and, if so,
why. Cultural differences in maternal reminiscing
style have been attributed to culturally defined
concepts of self and other. How might this extend to
arguments about class? And how might class and
culture interact? A few researchers have begun to
examine these questions (e.g., Melzi, 2000), although
not all focus on maternal elaboration (Miller et al.,
1997; Minami, 1997). Coordinating these approaches
is critical to gain a more sensitive and diverse
understanding of the process and functions of maternal reminiscing style.
A second theme focuses on the role of children’s
characteristics in shaping maternal reminiscing style.
More research has examined this question, and we
know that child temperament, attachment status,
and possibly language skills and gender contribute
to maternal reminiscing style. However, we do not
yet know whether the same child characteristics
shape maternal reminiscing style in the same ways in
non-Western cultures (but see Melzi & Fernandez,
2004, for some relevant data). Another critical issue
here is developmental differences. Although the
majority of research has been conducted on mother –
preschool child dyads, little research has tried to
elucidate how child characteristics may influence
maternal reminiscing style in different ways at different points during this extended developmental
period. For example, as mentioned earlier, child
language skills and self-awareness may be more related to maternal reminiscing style early in the preschool years but not in the later preschool years. We
need to map out these kinds of developmental differences in more detail, and provide a theoretical
framework for understanding when and how such
developmental differences appear.
In addition, future research should examine other
potentially important outcomes of maternal reminiscing style. For instance, although a great deal is
known about children’s developing understanding
of time, and an understanding of time is obviously
important in the development of autobiographical
memory (Friedman, 2003, 2004), research has not yet
addressed the link between mother – child reminiscing and independent assessments of children’s time
concepts. Another critical area is relations between
reminiscing and attachment. It may be through
participating in more elaborated reminiscing that
children build more coherent and elaborated work-
ing models of relationships, and in this way attachment may be as much an outcome as a predictor of
maternal reminiscing style.
A third theme is that we are now in a position to
conduct experimental studies of reminiscing style on
various aspects of children’s development, such as
their understanding of mind, self, emotion, language
and literacy, and strategic memory. These domains
have been targeted in correlational research as potential outcomes of an elaborative reminiscing style,
but experimental work would bolster the causal argument. In training and intervention studies, as well
as in further correlational work, it will be important
to include other types of maternal conversation to
contrast the effects of elaborative talk in general with
the specific influence of elaborative talk about the
past. As argued here, reminiscing seems to be a
distinct conversational context, and the few studies
that have compared maternal reminiscing to maternal talk in other contexts have demonstrated that
maternal elaborative reminiscing uniquely predicts
multiple aspects of child outcome, but, clearly, future
research needs to confirm and extend these findings.
The fourth theme is the need to both deepen and
broaden our understanding of maternal reminiscing
style. As we recommended above, we need to take a
more detailed look at different types of elaborations,
and what is being elaborated upon, to more fully
understand how maternal elaborative style influences child outcome. It is possible that the concept as
it exists in the literature is too global, and that different types of elaborations have different effects on
different child outcomes. For example, as suggested
here, it may be elaborating specifically on emotional
content that is related to attachment status, or that it
is specifically open-ended elaborations that facilitate
strategic memory development. Researchers need to
think more carefully about how and why maternal
elaborative reminiscing is related to the specific outcome measures they are interested in, and examine
maternal elaborations in a more fine-grained fashion
to begin to tease apart the developmental story.
Moreover, examining elaborations alone as a key
indicator of reminiscing style may not be enough. We
also need to look in more detail at the way in which
mothers negotiate the past with their children when
they disagree about the facts or the emotions of a
past event. As argued here, these kinds of negotiations may be critical for children’s developing
awareness of memory as a representational system,
and for a developing understanding of self and
other. These disagreements occur rarely in everyday
talk about the past, at least in middle-class samples;
hence they are difficult to study. Researchers will
Maternal Reminiscing Style
have to devise innovative ways to increase the
number of these kinds of negotiations in mother –
child reminiscing, perhaps through exposing mothers and children to different versions of events, or
through focusing on conflict situations.
Related to this, the research has focused on the
language interaction per se. Although we argue that
language is critical in the developmental process, it
would be interesting to extend maternal reminiscing
style to nonverbal aspects of the interaction as well.
Especially when discussing emotional experiences,
the nonverbal expression of emotion through tone of
voice, facial expression, and body language may
shed new light on the process and function of reminiscing.
Finally, we need to broaden the research base beyond mother – preschooler conversations about
everyday shared past events that are so often studied. The focus on mothers reflects a deep-seated assumption within developmental psychology that
mothers are the critical socialization agent for
children. We do not disagree that mothers are important, but children grow up in rich, complex social
worlds. Reminiscing style can be extended to
grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers, siblings,
and peers (for research on fathers, see Buckner &
Fivush, 2000; Reese et al., 1996; for research on
intergenerational reminiscing, see Pratt & Fiese,
2004).
Moreover, the focus on the preschool years reflects
the interest in the emergence of autobiographical
memory, clearly an important developmental process (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Reminiscing continues
to play a role in social interactions as children grow
older. It is in adolescence that children begin to coalesce their memories into a life narrative (Habermas
& Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 2001), and as children
venture into a larger social world, reminiscing may
play an increasingly vital part of their social interactions with family and friends. Moreover, reminiscing does not only occur in a dyadic context. How
the family as a whole reminisces about their past is
an intriguing question from both a developmental
and a family systems approach (Kreppner, 2002). In
recent work Fivush and her colleagues have explored family reminiscing style and have found that
families that reminisce together in a more elaborated,
collaborative fashion have preadolescent children
who show higher well-being and self-understanding
(Bohanek, Marin, Fivush, & Duke, in press), attesting
to the continued importance of reminiscing in
developmental outcome across childhood.
On a final note, we need to examine reminiscing
style for other types of past event narratives: stories
1583
about the child and stories told to the child, about
their own past as well as the past of others, the beginning of placing one’s own life experiences in the
broader context of family, culture, and history (Fivush, Bohanek, & Duke, in press; Pratt & Fiese, 2004).
In this paper, we focused on research demonstrating
the power of the construct of maternal reminiscing
style for understanding multiple aspects of preschool children’s cognitive and socioemotional development. These early interactions set the stage for
the creation of a life narrative linked to memory,
language, self, and other. Ultimately, an autobiography does not start with the self, but in social
interaction. Through language, children weave
memories of their own past with past generations
that have set the stage for the child’s entry into the
narrative.
References
Ackil, J. K., Van Abbema, D. L., & Bauer, P. J. (2003). After
the storm: Enduring differences in mother – child recollections of traumatic and nontraumatic events. Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology, 84, 286 – 309.
Bauer, P. J., & Burch, M. M. (2004). Developments in early
memory: Multiple mediators of foundational processes.
In J. M. Lucariello, J. A. Hudson, R. Fivush, & P. J. Bauer
(Eds.), The development of the mediated mind (pp. 101 –
125). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bauer, P., Stennes, L., & Haight, J. (2003). Representation of
the inner self in autobiography: Women’s and men’s use
of internal states language in personal narratives.
Memory, 11, 27 – 42.
Bird, A., & Reese, E. (2006). Emotional reminiscing and the
development of an autobiographical self. Developmental
Psychology, 42, 613 – 626.
Bird, A., Reese, E., & Tripp, G. (2006). Parent – child talk
about past emotional events: Associations with child
temperament and goodness-of-fit. Journal of Cognition
and Development, 7, 189 – 210.
Bohanek, J. G., Marin, K. A., Fivush, R., & Duke, M. (2006).
Family narrative interaction and children’s self-understanding. Family Process, 45, 39 – 54.
Boland, A. M., Haden, C. A., & Ornstein, P. A. (2003).
Boosting children’s memory by training mothers in
the use of an elaborative conversational style as an
event unfolds. Journal of Cognition and Development, 4,
39 – 65.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment.
New York: Basic Books.
Bretherton, I., & Mulholland, K. A. (1999). Internal working
models in attachment relations: A construct revisited. In
J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment:
Theory, research, and clinical applications (pp. 89 – 111).
New York: Guilford.
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
1584
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
Buckner, J. P., & Fivush, R. (1998). Gender and self in
children’s autobiographical narratives. Applied Cognitive
Psychology, 12, 407 – 429.
Buckner, J. P., & Fivush, R. (2000). Gendered themes in
reminiscing. Memory, 8, 401 – 412.
Burger, L. K., & Miller, P. J. (1999). Early talk about the past
revisited: Affect in working-class and middle-class
children’s co-narrations. Journal of Child Language, 26,
133 – 162.
Carpendale, J. I. M., & Lewis, C. (2004). Constructing an
understanding of mind: The development of children’s
social understanding within social interactions. Brain
and Behavior Sciences, 27, 79 – 151.
Cleveland, E., & Reese, E. (2005). Maternal structure and
autonomy support in conversations about the past:
Contributions to children’s autobiographical memory.
Developmental Psychology, 41, 376 – 388.
Conroy, R. (2006). Children’s memory for traumatic events: The
influence of post-event avoidance and elaboration. Unpublished dissertation, University of New South Wales,
Australia.
Conway, M. A., Singer, J. A., & Tagini, A. (2004). The self in
autobiographical memory: Correspondence and coherence. Social Cognition, 22, 491 – 529.
Cowan, N. (1997). The development of memory in children:
Studies in developmental psychology. Hove, UK: Psychology Press/Erlbaum.
Ely, R., Gleason, J. G., Narasimhan, B., & McCabe, A.
(1995). Family talk about talk: Mothers lead the way.
Discourse Processes, 19, 201 – 218.
Engel, S. (1986). Learning to reminisce: A developmental study
of how young children talk about the past. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, City University of New York.
Farrant, K. (2000). A tale of autobiographical memory. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Otago, Dunedin,
New Zealand.
Farrant, K., & Reese, E. (2000). Maternal style and children’s participation in reminiscing: Stepping stones in
children’s autobiographical memory development.
Journal of Cognition and Development, 1, 193 – 225.
Farrar, M. J., Fasig, L. G., & Welch-Ross, M. K. (1997). Attachment and emotion in autobiographical memory
development. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 67,
389 – 408.
Fivush, R. (1991). The social construction of personal narratives. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 37, 59 – 82.
Fivush, R. (1998). Gendered narratives: Elaboration,
structure and emotion in parent – child reminiscing
across the preschool years. In C. P. Thompson, D. J.
Herrmann, D. Bruce, J. D. Read, D. G. Payne, & M. P.
Toglia (Eds.), Autobiographical memory: Theoretical and
applied perspectives (pp. 79 – 104). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fivush, R. (2001). Owning experience: The development of
subjective perspective in autobiographical memory. In
C. Moore & K. Lemmon (Eds.). The self in time: Developmental perspectives (pp. 35 – 52). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fivush, R. (2004). Voice and silence: A feminist model of
autobiographical memory. In J. M. Lucariello, J. A.
Hudson, R. Fivush, & P. J. Bauer (Eds.), The development
of the mediated mind (pp. 79 – 100). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Fivush, R., Berlin, L., Sales, J. M., Mennuti-Washburn, J.,
& Cassidy, J. (2003). Functions of parent – child reminiscing
about emotionally negative events. Memory, 11, 179 – 192.
Fivush, R., Bohanek, J. G., & Duke, M. (in press). The
intergenerational self: Subjective perspective and family
history. In F. Sani (Ed.), Individual and collective self-continuity. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fivush, R., Brotman, M., Buckner, J. P., & Goodman, S.
(2000). Gender differences in parent – child emotion
narratives. Sex Roles, 42, 233 – 254.
Fivush, R., & Buckner, J. (2003). Constructing gender and
identity through autobiographical narratives. In R. Fivush & C. Haden (Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the
construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural
perspectives (pp. 149 – 167). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fivush, R., & Fromhoff, F. (1988). Style and structure in
mother – child conversations about the past. Discourse
Processes, 11, 337 – 355.
Fivush, R., & Haden, C. (1997). Narrating and representing
experience: Preschoolers’ developing autobiographical
recounts. In P. van den Broek, P. A. Bauer, & T. Bourg
(Eds.), Developmental spans in event comprehension and
representation: Bridging fictional and actual events (pp.
169 – 198). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fivush, R., & Haden, C. A. (Eds.). (2003). Autobiographical
memory and the construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Fivush, R., & Haden, C. A. (2005). Parent – child reminiscing and the construction of a subjective self. In B. D.
Homer & C. S. Tamis-LeMonda (Eds.), The development of
social cognition and communication (pp. 315 – 335). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fivush, R., Haden, C., & Reese, E. (1996). Remembering,
recounting and reminiscing: The development of autobiographical memory in social context. In D. Rubin
(Ed.), Reconstructing our past: An overview of autobiographical memory (pp. 341 – 359). New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Fivush, R., & Nelson, K. (2006). Mother – child talk about
the past locates the self in time. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24, 235 – 251.
Fivush, R., & Reese, E. (2002). Origins of reminiscing. In J.
Webster & B. Haight (Eds.), Critical advances in reminiscence work (pp. 109 – 122). New York: Springer.
Fivush, R., & Sales, J. M. (2006). Coping, attachment, and
mother – child reminiscing about stressful events. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 52, 125 – 150.
Fivush, R., & Vasudeva, A. (2002). Remembering to relate:
Socioemotional correlates of mother – child reminiscing.
Journal of Cognition and Development, 3, 73 – 90.
Fivush, R., & Wang, Q. (2005). Emotion talk in mother –
child conversation of the shared past: The effects of
culture, gender, and event valence. Journal of Cognition
and Development, 6, 489 – 506.
Maternal Reminiscing Style
Flannagan, D., Baker-Ward, L., & Graham, L. (1995). Talk
about preschool: Patterns of topic discussion and
elaboration related to gender and ethnicity. Sex Roles, 32,
1 – 15.
Friedman, W. J. (2003). The development of a differentiated
sense of the past and the future. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 31, 229 – 269.
Friedman, W. J. (2004). Time in autobiographical memory.
Social Cognition, 22, 591 – 605.
Grolnick, W. S. (2003). The psychology of parental control: How
well-meant parenting backfires. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Habermas, T., & Bluck, S. (2000). Getting a life: The emergence of the life story in adolescence. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 748 – 769.
Haden, C. (1998). Reminiscing with different children:
Relating maternal stylistic consistency and sibling
similarity in talk about the past. Developmental Psychology, 34, 99 – 114.
Haden, C., Haine, R., & Fivush, R. (1997). Developing
narrative structure in parent – child conversations about
the past. Developmental Psychology, 33, 295 – 307.
Haden, C. A., & Fivush, R. (1996). Contextual variation in
maternal conversational styles. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly,
42, 200 – 227.
Haden, C. A., Ornstein, P. A., Eckerman, C. O., & Didow, S.
M. (2001). Mother – child conversational interactions as
events unfold: Linkages to subsequent remembering.
Child Development, 72, 1016 – 1031.
Haden, C. A., Ornstein, P. A., Rudek, D. J., & Branstein, D.
(2006). Reminiscing in the early years: Patterns of maternal
elaborativeness and children’s remembering. Manuscript
under review.
Harley, K., & Reese, E. (1999). Origins of autobiographical
memory. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1338 – 1348.
Hayne, H., & MacDonald, S. (2003). The socialization of
autobiographical memory in children and adults: The
roles of culture and gender. In R. Fivush & C. A. Haden
(Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the construction of a
narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives (pp.
99 – 120). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11,
49 – 76.
Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence:
Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development, 74, 1368 –
1378.
Hoff-Ginsburg, E. (1991). Mother – child conversations in
different social classes and communicative settings.
Child Development, 62, 782 – 796.
Hudson, J. A. (1990). The emergence of autobiographic
memory in mother – child conversation. In R. Fivush & J.
A. Hudson (Eds.), Knowing and remembering in young
children (pp. 166 – 196). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hudson, J. A. (2002). Do you know what we’re going to
do this summer? Mothers’ talk to preschool children
1585
about future events. Journal of Cognitive Development, 3,
49 – 71.
Kail, R., & Bisanz, J. (1982). Information processing and
cognitive development. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in
child development and behavior (Vol. 17, pp. 45 – 81). New
York: Academic.
Kreppner, K. (2002). Retrospect and prospect in the psychological study of families as systems. In J. McHale &
W. Grolnick (Eds.), Retrospect and prospect in the psychological study of families (pp. 225 – 257). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Laible, D. (2004a). Mother – child discourse in two contexts:
Links with child temperament, attachment security, and
socioemotional competence. Developmental Psychology,
40, 979 – 992.
Laible, D. (2004b). Mother – child discourse about a child’s
past behavior at 30-months and early socioemotional
development at age 3. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 50, 159 –
180.
Laible, D. (2006). Affect and discourse in mother – child coconstructions: Constructing emotional and relational
understanding. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 52, 44 – 69.
Laible, D., & Thompson, R. (2000). Mother – child discourse,
attachment security, shared positive affect, and early conscience development. Child Development, 71, 1424 – 1440.
Leichtman, M., Wang, Q., & Pillemer, D. P. (2003). Cultural
variation in interdependence and autobiographical
memory. In R. Fivush & C. Haden (Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives (pp. 73 – 98). Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Leichtman, M. D., Pillemer, D. B., Wang, Q., Koreishi, A., &
Han, J. J. (2000). When Baby Maisy came to school:
Mothers’ interview styles and preschoolers’ event
memories. Cognitive Development, 15, 99 – 114.
Lewis, K. (1999). Maternal style in reminiscing: Relations to
child individual differences. Cognitive Development, 14,
381 – 399.
Lewis, M., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1979). Social cognition and the
acquisition of the self. New York: Plenum.
Lewis, M., & Ramsay, D. S. (1997). Stress reactivity and self
recognition. Child Development, 68, 621 – 629.
Low, J., & Durkin, K. (2001). Individual differences and
consistency in maternal talk style during joint story encoding and retrospection: Associations with children’s
long-term recall. International Journal of Behavioral
Development, 25, 27 – 36.
Lucariello, J., Kyratzis, A., & Engel, S. (1986). Event
representations, context, and language. In K. Nelson
(Ed.), Event knowledge: Structure and function in development (pp. 137 – 160). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Association.
Lucariello, J., & Nelson, K. (1987). Remembering and
planning talk between mothers and children. Discourse
Processes, 10, 219 – 235.
MacDonald, S., Uesiliana, K., & Hayne, H. (2000). Crosscultural and gender differences in childhood amnesia.
Memory, 8, 365 – 376.
1586
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
Main, M., Goldwyn, R., & Hesse, E. (2002). Adult attachment
scoring and classification systems. Unpublished coding
manual, University of California at Berkeley, CA.
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5, 100 – 122.
McCabe, A., & Peterson, C. (1991). Getting the story: A
longitudinal study of parental styles in eliciting narratives and developing narrative skill. In A. McCabe & C.
Peterson (Eds.), Developing narrative structure (pp. 217 –
253). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
McGuigan, F., & Salmon, K. (2004). The time to talk: The
influence of the timing of adult – child talk on children’s
event memory. Child Development, 75, 669 – 686.
McGuigan, F., & Salmon, K. (2005). Pre-event discussion
and recall of a novel event: How are children best
prepared? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 91,
342 – 366.
Melzi, G. (2000). Cultural variations in the construction of
personal narratives: Central American and European
American mothers’ elicitation styles. Discourse Processes,
30, 153 – 177.
Melzi, G., & Fernandez, C. (2004). Talking about past
emotions: Conversations between Peruvian mothers and
their preschool children. Sex Roles, 50, 641 – 657.
Miller, P. J., Wiley, A., Fung, H., & Liang, C. (1997). Personal
storytelling as a medium of socialization in Chinese and
American families. Child Development, 68, 557 – 568.
Minami, M. (1997). Cultural constructions of meaning:
Cross-cultural comparisons of mother – child conversations about the past. In C. Mandell & A. McCabe (Eds.),
The problem of meaning: Behavioral and cognitive perspectives (pp. 297 – 345). Amsterdam, the Netherlands:
North-Holland/Elsevier Science Publishers.
Minami, M., & McCabe, A. (1995). Rice balls and bear
hunts: Japanese and North American family narrative
patterns. Journal of Child Language, 22, 423 – 445.
Moore, C., & Lemmon, K. (Eds.), (2001). The self in time:
Developmental perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Mullen, M., & Yi, S. (1995). The cultural context of talk
about the past: Implications for the development of
autobiographical memory. Cognitive Development, 10,
407 – 419.
Nelson, K. (1986). Event knowledge: Structure and function in
development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nelson, K. (1996). Language in Cognitive Development.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nelson, K. (2001). From the experiencing I to the continuing me. In C. Moore & K. Lemmon (Eds.), The self in time:
Developmental perspectives (pp. 15 – 33). Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Nelson, K., & Fivush, R. (2004). The Emergence of Autobiographical Memory: A Social Cultural Developmental
Theory. Psychological Review, 111, 486 – 511.
Nelson, K., & Gruendel, J. (1979). Generalized event representations: Basic building blocks of cognitive development. In A. L. Brown & M. E. Lamb (Eds.), Advances in
developmental psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 131 – 158). Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Newcombe, R., & Reese, E. (2004). Evaluations and orientations in mother – child narratives as a function of
attachment security: A longitudinal investigation. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 28, 230 – 245.
Oppenheim, D., Nir, A., Warren, S., & Emde, R. N.
(1997). Emotion regulation in mother – child narrative
co-construction: Associations with children’s narrative and adaptation. Developmental Psychology, 33,
284 – 294.
Ornstein, P. A., Haden, C. A., & Elischberger, H. B. (2006).
Children’s memory development: Remembering the
past and preparing for the future. In E. Bialystok & F. I.
M. Craik (Eds.), Lifespan cognition: Mechanisms of change.
Oxford University Press (in press).
Ornstein, P. A., Haden, C. A., & Hedrick, A. M. (2004).
Learning to remember: Social-communicative exchanges
and the development of children’s memory skills.
Developmental Review, 24, 374 – 395.
Peterson, C., Jesso, B., & McCabe, A. (1999). Encouraging
narratives in preschoolers: An intervention study. Journal of Child Language, 26, 49 – 67.
Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (1992). Parental styles of narrative elicitation: Effect on children’s narrative structure
and content. First Language, 12, 299 – 321.
Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (1994). A social interactionist
account of developing decontextualized narrative skill.
Developmental Psychology, 30, 937 – 948.
Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (1996). Parental scaffolding
of context in children’s narratives. In C. E. Johnson
& J. H. V. Gilbert (Eds.), Children’s language (Vol. 9,
pp. 183 – 196). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (2004). Echoing our parents:
Parental influences on children’s narration. In M. W.
Pratt & B. H. Fiese (Eds.), Family stories and the life course:
Across time and generations (pp. 27 – 54). Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Peterson, C., & Roberts, C. (2003). Like mother, like
daughter: Similarities in narrative style. Developmental
Psychology, 39, 551 – 562.
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1973). Memory and intelligence.
New York: Basic Books.
Pillemer, D. (1998). Momentous events, vivid memories.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Pillow, B. H. (1989). Early understanding of perception as a
source of knowledge. Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology, 47, 116 – 129.
Pratt, M. W., & Fiese, B. H. (2004). Family stories and the life
course: Across time and generations. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ratner, H. H. (1984). Memory demands and the development of memory. Child Development, 55, 2173 – 2192.
Reese, E. (1995). Predicting children’s literacy from mother – child conversations. Cognitive Development, 10,
381 – 405.
Reese, E. (2002a). A model of the origins of autobiographical memory. In J. W. Fagen & H. Hayne (Eds.),
Maternal Reminiscing Style
Progress in infancy research (Vol. 2, pp. 215 – 260). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Reese, E. (2002b). Social factors in the development of
autobiographical memory: The state of the art. Social
Development, 11, 124 – 142.
Reese, E. (2005). Autobiographical memory across generations.
Paper presented at the International Society for Culture
and Activity Research, Seville, Spain.
Reese, E., Bird, A., & Tripp, G. (in press). Children’s selfesteem and moral self: Links to parent – child conversations about emotion. Social Development.
Reese, E., & Brown, N. (2000). Reminiscing and recounting
in the preschool years. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14,
1 – 17.
Reese, E., & Cleveland, E. (2006). Mother – child reminiscing and children’s understanding of mind. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 52, 17 – 43.
Reese, E., & Farrant, K. (2003). Origins of reminiscing in
parent – child relationships. In R. Fivush & C. A. Haden
(Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the construction of a
narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives (pp.
29 – 48). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Reese, E., Haden, C. A., & Fivush, R. (1993). Mother – child
conversations about the past: Relationships of style
and memory over time. Cognitive Development, 8,
403 – 430.
Reese, E., Haden, C., & Fivush, R. (1996). Mothers, father,
daughters, sons: Gender differences in reminiscing. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 29, 27 – 56.
Reese, E., Stewart, S., & Newcombe, R. (2003). Mothers’
elaborative talk about the past enhances children’s language
and memory. Poster presented at the Cognitive Development Society meetings, Park City, UT.
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Rudek, D. J. (2004). Reminiscing about past events: Influences
on children’s deliberate memory and metacognitive skills.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Loyola University
Chicago.
Rudek, D., & Haden, C. A. (2005). Mothers’ and preschoolers’ mental state language during reminiscing
over time. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 51, 557 – 583.
Sales, J. M., & Fivush, R. (2005). Social and emotional
functions of mother – child reminiscing about stressful
events. Social Cognition, 23, 70 – 90.
Sales, J. M., Fivush, R., & Peterson, C. (2003). Parental
reminiscing about positive and negative events. Journal
of Cognition and Development, 4, 185 – 209.
Schneider, W., & Bjorklund, D. F. (1998). Memory. In W.
Damon (General Ed.), D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Volume
Eds.), Handbook of child psychology, cognition, perception,
and language (Vol. 2, 5th ed., pp. 467 – 521). New York:
Wiley.
Shaver, P. R., & Mikulincer, M. (2002). Attachment-related
psychodynamics. Attachment and Human Development, 4,
133 – 161.
Sigel, I. E. (1993). The centrality of a distancing model
for the development of representational competence.
1587
In R. R. Cocking & K. A. Renninger (Eds.), The development and meaning of psychological distance (pp. 141 – 158).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Snow, C. E. (1983). Literacy and language: Relationships
during the preschool years. Harvard Educational Review,
53, 165 – 189.
Sparks, A., Reese, E., & Kalia, V. (2005). Home influences
on child language and literacy in low-income families.
Paper presented in F. J. Morrison (Chair), The socialization of cognition: Environmental influences on developmental
change. Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in
Child Development, Atlanta, GA.
Srivastava, S., Reese, E., & Newcombe, R. (2004). Links
between preschoolers’ shared past event narratives with
mothers and literacy development. In S. Srivastava & E.
Reese (co-chairs), Social sources of narrative and literacy.
Paper presented at Jean Piaget Society meetings in
Toronto, ON.
Symons, D. K. (2004). Mental state discourse, theory of
mind, and an internalization of self-other understanding. Developmental Review, 24, 159 – 188.
Tessler, M., & Nelson, K. (1994). Making memories: The
influence of joint encoding on later recall by young
children. Consciousness and Cognition, 3, 307 – 326.
Thompson, R. (2000). The legacy of early attachments.
Child Development, 71, 145 – 152.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of
higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Wang, Q. (2001). ‘‘Did you have fun?’’: American and
Chinese mother – child conversations about shared
emotional experiences. Cognitive Development, 16, 693 –
715.
Wang, Q. (2003). Emotion situation knowledge in American and Chinese preschool children and adults. Cognition and Emotion, 17, 725 – 746.
Wang, Q., & Fivush, R. (2005). Mother – child conversations
of emotionally salient events: Exploring the functions of
reminiscing in Euro-American and Chinese families.
Social Development, 14, 473 – 495.
Welch-Ross, M. K. (1997). Mother – child participation in
conversation about the past: Relationship to preschoolers’ theory of mind. Developmental Psychology, 33, 618 –
629.
Welch-Ross, M. K. (2001). Personalizing the temporally
extended self: Evaluative self-awareness and the development of autobiographical memory. In C. Moore &
K. Skene (Eds.), The self in time: Developmental issues (pp.
97 – 120). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Welch-Ross, M. K., Fasig, L., & Farrar, M. J. (1999).
Predictors of preschoolers’ self-knowledge: Reference
to emotion and mental states in mother – child conversation about past events. Cognitive Development, 14,
401 – 422.
Wellman, H. M. (2002). Understanding the psychological
world: Developing a theory of mind. In U. Goswami
(Ed.), Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development
(pp. 167 – 187). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
1588
Fivush, Haden, and Reese
Wiley, A. R., Rose, A. J., Burger, L. K., & Miller, P. J. (1998).
Constructing autonomous selves through narrative
practices: a comparative study of working-class
and middle-class families. Child Development, 69,
833 – 847.
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs:
Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in children’s understanding of deception. Cognition,
13, 103 – 128.