Developmental differences in children's immediate and delayed memory for emotionally negative and neutral events.

Abstract

This study examined the effects of role of age,temperament, emotion,and interview prompt on children's memory recall. Thirty-four preschool children and 34 elementary school children were interviewed about a story immediately and one week after watching a film containing an emotionally neutral or an emotionally negative ending. Initially younger children reported more features than older children, but not after one week. More details were reported at the initial interview than the one-week interview for children of both age groups. Overall, children provided more accurate and complete responses to general open-ended prompts than non-leading and leading/misleading prompts. However, younger children reported more features and details to non-leading and leading/misleading prompts than the older children. Children who viewed the emotionally negative film were able to provide more features and details to open-ended prompts than those who viewed the emotionally neutral film. Children who viewed the emotionally neutral film provided more features and details than those children who viewed the emotionally negative film when using leading/misleading prompts. All children were able to recognize the protagonist's mood at the beginning of the story, although younger children who viewed the neutral story had difficulty identifying the mood at the end of the story, whereas, all of the other children did not. Individual differences were not significant.