Young Children’s Negative Interpretation in Memory Recall is Related to Mother’s Negativity in Reminiscing Conversations

Conversations at home between mother and child can impact children’s patterns of memory recall and storytelling. Conducting research into this special phenomena can be helpful in legal situations and interviews, where children are expected to give a truthful and accurate account of past events. Three different experiments were conducted with dyads of mother and child: A shared memory task where mother and child talked about shared memories that made the child happy, sad, scared, and angry; an electronic survey that asked the mother how she would react in theoretical ambiguous situations; and a slime task where children were asked to react to a person doing ambiguous actions. Through completing these three experiments with mothers and their children, I found that children with mothers who had a more negative interpretation of ambiguous events were more likely to interpret ambiguous situations negatively themselves. This knowledge is significant in legal contexts because it allows interviewers to modify interrogation techniques so that children can give testimonies without being manipulated or unintentionally deceitful