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Parental Attachment and Children's Memory for Attachment-Relevant Stories.
Helen M Milojevich1, Jodi A Quas1
1Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine.
Applied Developmental Science
|January 9, 2018
Summary
Parental attachment styles influence children's memory for attachment stories. Interviewer support at retrieval critically affects how parental attachment, specifically avoidance, relates to children's memory accuracy.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Attachment Theory
- Childhood Memory
Background:
- Parental attachment security is linked to children's cognitive development, including memory.
- Mechanisms and contextual factors influencing the parent-child attachment-memory link remain underexplored.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if parental attachment predicts children's memory for attachment-themed stories.
- To examine story cohesiveness as a mediator between parental attachment and child memory.
- To determine if interview support during memory retrieval moderates this association.
Main Methods:
- Five- to 6-year-old children created attachment-relevant stories.
- Parents reported on their own romantic attachment styles.
- Children's stories were assessed for narrative cohesiveness.
- Children's memory for stories was tested a week later, with interviewers providing either supportive or non-supportive conditions.
Main Results:
- Parental attachment avoidance was linked to poorer memory recall in a non-supportive interview setting.
- Conversely, in a supportive interview, greater parental avoidance correlated with fewer memory errors.
- Story cohesiveness did not significantly mediate the attachment-memory relationship.
Conclusions:
- The influence of parental attachment on children's memory is context-dependent.
- Interviewer support plays a crucial role in modulating the expression of the attachment-memory association.
- Findings highlight the importance of supportive retrieval environments for children's memory performance, especially concerning attachment-related information.