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Research on Talking About thePast: The Past, Present, andFutureCatherine A. Haden a & Peter A. Ornstein ba Loyola University Chicago ,b University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ,Published online: 03 Sep 2009.

To cite this article: Catherine A. Haden & Peter A. Ornstein (2009) Research onTalking About the Past: The Past, Present, and Future, Journal of Cognition andDevelopment, 10:3, 135-142, DOI: 10.1080/15248370903155718

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INTRODUCTION

Research on Talking About the Past:The Past, Present, and Future

Catherine A. HadenLoyola University Chicago

Peter A. OrnsteinUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research on mother–child reminiscing about previously experienced eventscarried out over the last 20 years indicates clear linkages between mothers’use of an elaborative conversational style and children’s developing skillsfor remembering. The articles that comprise this special issue utilize bothlongitudinal designs and experimental methods, focus on social-emotional aswell as cognitive outcomes, consider the family as the unit of analysis, andexamine the continuing impact of reminiscing in adolescence. Taken asa collection, the work presented here advances our understanding of the impactof reminiscing on development. In this introduction to the special issue, wesketch the central themes, as we see them, in past, present, and future researchon reminiscing.

The four papers in this special issue of the Journal of Cognition andDevelopment present innovative research that advances the now two decadesof work on maternal reminiscing style (see Bauer, 2007; Fivush, Haden, &Reese, 2006, for reviews). By making use of both longitudinal designs andexperimental methods and focusing on social-emotional as well as cognitive

Correspondence should be sent to Catherine A. Haden, Department of Psychology, Loyola

University Chicago, 1032 W. Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60660. E-mail: chaden@luc.edu

JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT, 10(3):135–142

Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1524-8372 print=1532-7647 online

DOI: 10.1080/15248370903155718

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outcomes, the authors of these articles increase our understanding of linkagesbetween the ways adults and children talk about both present and past eventsand children’s memory. Taken as a whole, the set of papers illustrates that (1)longitudinal research can both broaden and deepen our understanding of whatit is about an elaborative style that may be particularly important for specificchild outcomes; (2) experimental manipulations can build upon longitudinalfindings and enable us tomake causal statements; (3) parent-child conversationsabout the past can impact a range of cognitive and social-emotional outcomes;and that (4) reminiscing is not purely a dyadic activity, and family reminiscingcan continue to be important for development throughout childhood.

TALKING ABOUT THE PAST: THE PAST

The initial research on the ways in which parents and children talk about thepast established clear and consistent individual differences in maternalreminiscing that ranged along a dimension of elaborativeness (e.g., Fivush& Fromhoff, 1988). In contrast to parents who demonstrate alow-elaborative style, those who employ a high-elaborative style, ask manyquestions, follow in on their children’s efforts to contribute to the conversa-tion, and continue to add new information even when children do not.Research has indicated that these reminiscing styles generalize across discus-sions of different types of past events (e.g., zoo or museum trips, excursions,and holidays) and tend to be consistent over several years with the samechildren (Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1993), as well as across different-agedchildren in the same family (Haden, 1998). An expanding body of workpoints to cultural differences in reminiscing (see Fivush & Haden, 2003,for a review). Moreover, research focusing on the relations between childcharacteristics and maternal style has suggested that, in general, mothersare more elaborative with girls and with children who have better linguisticskills, who are temperamentally persistent and social, and who are securelyattached (see Bauer, 2007; Fivush et al., 2006, for reviews). Most important,longitudinal studies in which children and their parents have been trackedover several years have shown clear differences in the independent recallskills of children of whose mothers use a high as opposed to alow-elaborative style (e.g., Bauer & Burch, 2004; Farrant & Reese, 2000;Haden, Ornstein, Rudek, & Cameron, 2009; Reese et al., 1993). Childrenof high-elaborative mothers recall more information about their past exp-eriences than children of low-elaborative mothers, with maternal styleuniquely predicting children’s memory, even when child characteristics, suchas language, temperament, and attachment status have been taken intoaccount.

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TALKING ABOUT THE PAST: THE PRESENT

Longitudinal Studies Examining Mechanisms of Change

Longitudinal designs, such as those employed in previous work on linkagesbetween reminiscing style and children’s memory, have been essential inmoving the field beyond the study of memory development—that is, thecharacterization of the memory skills of children of different ages—to anexploration of the development of memory. Indeed, to truly study the devel-opment of memory, we need to describe the ways in which early demonstra-tions of skill are related to later articulations of cognitive competency, andfor this task there is no substitute for longitudinal methodology (seeOrnstein & Haden, 2001; 2008, for further discussion). In this regard, wenote that researchers who study autobiographical memory have been aheadof their colleagues who examine children’s use of deliberate memory strate-gies (Ornstein, Haden, & San Souci, 2008). A hallmark of longitudinal stu-dies of event memory carried out to date is the attention to the difficultdevelopmental question of, ‘‘What are the factors that operate to bring aboutdevelopmental change?’’ This interest notwithstanding, it is nonethelessimportant to ‘‘up the ante’’ so that longitudinal studies provide greater spe-cificity in describing mechanisms that drive development. For example,what is it about an elaborative style that makes it an important factor inchildren’s developing skills for remembering?

This question about specifying the mechanisms of development is thelaunching point for the first paper in this special issue by Hedrick, SanSouci, Haden, and Ornstein (in this issue). An elaborative style is character-ized by a constellation of many conversational elements (e.g., open-endedquestions, evaluations). But as these authors point out, our understandingof what aspects of an elaborative style are critical at what ages to supportwhat particular developments is limited because elaborativeness is deli-neated in varying amounts of detail across studies. These authors focuson what is thought of as a key element of an elaborative style: adults’ useof open-ended, so-called Wh- questions (e.g., who, what, where, why, andhow) that elicit new information from a child. However, rather than group-ing parents on the basis of the extent to which they employed these types ofquestions, as has been done in prior characterizations of maternal reminis-cing style (Farrant & Reese, 2000; Haden et al., 2009), the authors of thispaper consider how Wh- questions were or were not responded to by thechildren and form groups at the level of the dyad. More specifically, in con-trast to ‘‘low joint talk’’ dyads, ‘‘high joint talk’’ dyads were characterizedby a high proportion of children’s correct responses to their mothers’ Wh-questions and low proportion of failures to respond to these queries. The

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authors make this classification based on observations of parents andchildren as they took part in different novel adventures—camping andbird watching events—in their living rooms when the children were 36months old.

To be sure, conversations as events unfold have not been studied asextensively as conversations about the past, but it seems likely thatadult–child talk during an ongoing event can enhance children’s under-standing of the experience, facilitate memory for the details of the activity,and have a long-term impact on development of mnemonic skills (Boland,Haden, & Ornstein, 2003; Haden, Ornstein, Eckerman, & Didow, 2001;Ornstein, Haden, & Hedrick, 2004). In fact, Hedrick et al. (2009) find clearand consistent linkages between mother-child joint talk as events unfold andchildren’s memory reports over time. They go on to discuss how movingtoward a more detailed analysis of elaborative talk—during and afterexperiences—can be profitable in suggesting potentially important mechan-isms for event memory development.

Experimental Manipulations

Of course, longitudinal studies are inherently correlational in nature, andexperimental manipulations are clearly necessary to make causal statements.The value of experimental methods in examining the operation of factorsthat emerge from longitudinal and observational work as potential media-tors of development is illustrated by two papers in this special issue. VanBergen, Salmon, Dadds, and Allen (in this issue) present a study in whichmothers were instructed in the use of an elaborative style such that theywere encouraged to (1) ask elaborative Wh- questions, (2) provide detaileddescriptions of events, and (3) discuss emotions when reminiscing withtheir preschool-aged children. Immediately following instruction, andagain six months later, the authors found that compared to thenon-reminiscing instruction given to another group of mothers, the reminis-cing intervention was successful in elevating the mothers’ and the children’selaborative talk, as well as their emotion references during mother–childreminiscing. In contrast, however, there were no effects of the instructionalmanipulation on children’s memory reports to an examiner at eitherassessment point.

The Van Bergen et al. (2009) study illustrates that not only is it useful toconsider a broader range of conversational elements—including emotiontalk—in characterizing reminiscing style, it is also important to cast a widernet when thinking about outcomes. In this case, the authors include a mea-sure of young children’s emotion knowledge in addition to the cognitiveindicators of children’s memory reports with their mothers and an examiner.

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Although the effects of the reminiscing training on children’s emotionalunderstanding were decidedly mixed, compared to their counterparts inthe control condition, children in the reminiscing condition showed higherlevels of performance on the portion of the assessment that tapped thechildren’s abilities to provide causes of different emotions.

In a second experimental study, Hedrick, Haden, and Ornstein (in thisissue) extend longitudinal and observational research that has focused onthe impact of conversational interactions as events unfold and of subsequentjoint reminiscing on children’s memory. Specifically, the authors examinedthe independent and combined effects of participating in elaborative conver-sation during and=or after an event, so as to answer the question of whetherthe effects of elaborative conversation might be additive across multiple dis-cussions of the same event. In this study, the intervention was carried out bya researcher who used either a high- or low-elaborative conversational stylewith preschoolers as a camping event unfolded and=or in a memory conver-sation after the event occurred. In the high-elaborative during-event talkcondition, the researcher (1) asked Wh- questions that requested informa-tion, (2) made associations between the camping activity and what the chil-dren might know about or have previously experienced, and (3) offeredpositive evaluations that directly praised the children’s behaviorsand verbalizations. One day after the event, these same conversationaltechniques were used by the researcher in the high-elaborative post-eventconversation to elicit the children’s memory reports. In standard memoryinterviews conducted three weeks after the event, the children who exp-erienced high-elaborative talk during the event reported the most memoryinformation about the experience. There was also some suggestion thatthe effects of high-elaborative during-event talk were strongest when thechildren had also experienced the high-elaborative post-event memoryconversation.

While our understanding of how joint conversations that occur duringand after an event may differentially impact memory is still limited, it seemsimportant to consider that these discussions might influence differentaspects of recall. Talk during (and even before) events may be especiallyimportant for the sense that children make of an experience as it is takingplace, and therefore what is initially encoded and represented in memory.For effective remembering over the long term, however, children nonethe-less need to become skilled in searching memory and in reporting that whichhas been retrieved. In this regard, conversations about past events can pro-vide critical experience. Overall, continued exploration of the impact of thelanguage ‘‘milieu’’ that surrounds the developing child—including both dis-cussions of events in the present and the past—is necessary to characterizeadequately the factors that affect children’s developing memory skills.

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Family Remembering

In the last paper in this special issue, Fivush, Marin, McWilliams, andBohanek (in this issue) bring together several new directions in event mem-ory research. First, mother-preschooler conversations about shared pastevents have been studied extensively, and rightfully so, given their impor-tance for the socialization of cognition. But the impact of reminiscing—justas the activity of reminiscing itself—continues throughout childhood, andthe Fivush et al. study takes the important step of examining reminiscingwith older children. Second, reminiscing does not just occur in dyads, andin focusing on family reminiscing, Fivush et al. consider how mothers andfathers are both similar and different in their approach to this form of socialinteraction. Third, given that the type of event under discussion likelyimpacts both the type of talk that takes place and the effects of this talkon outcomes, Fivush et al. focus on comparing discussions of positive andnegative events as they relate to children’s well-being. The selection ofwell-being as an outcome measure illustrates once more the movement inresearch on reminiscing toward the examination of a greater range of con-sequences for the child that are not exclusively cognitive in nature.

Fivush et al. (2009) find intriguing similarities and differences in the waysin which mothers and fathers engage in family reminiscing. Mothers weremore elaborative than fathers, but both mothers and fathers provided moreelaborations and evaluations during discussions of positive rather thannegative events. Moreover, while there were no differences in the waysmothers and fathers talked about the emotional aspects of events, fathersbut not mothers were consistent in their use of elaborations and evaluationsacross discussions of factual and emotional information, as well as positiveand negative events. With respect to linkages to child well-being, Fivush andher colleagues observed different patterns of associations between the remi-niscing styles of mothers and fathers and the frequency of children’s inter-nalizing and externalizing behaviors.

TALKING ABOUT THE PAST: THE FUTURE

The studies reported in this special issue illustrate some of the ways in whichlongitudinal investigations that identify mediators of developmental change(e.g., parent–child conversation) can set the stage for experimental interven-tions that can enhance our understanding of children’s remembering. Assuggested above, we need to do more to examine how one potential media-tor—elaborative style—may serve to impact developmental change. Assuch, the future of research on talk about the past must continue whathas been in the field a strong commitment to longitudinal research that

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informs understanding of the development of memory. However, futurelongitudinal studies should be paired, when possible, with parallel experi-mental investigations in which hypothesized mediators of change arebrought under experimental control.

The studies presented here also extend the field in several importantways. First, by focusing on both social-emotional and cognitive outcomes,on the family as the unit of analysis, and on the continuing impact ofreminiscing in adolescence, these papers break new ground. Each of theseareas needs to be followed up in a new wave of longitudinal=experimentalresearch that focuses on the multiple contributions of reminiscing tochildren’s cognitive and social development. A movement beyond theindividual and the dyad to the family as the unit of analysis can also greatlyenhance our understanding of the long-term outcomes of reminiscing andthe factors that continue to affect development. Overall, just as the studiesin this special issue advance the field in new directions, they suggest newways to move it forward.

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