This project aims at testing the influence of children's emotional situation knowledge on their development of autobiographical memory within a cultural-familial context. It examines parent-child interactions over a period of two years, focusing on two distinct populations: European-Americans and Chinese immigrants. Maternal interaction styles will be assessed in laboratory and at home, in relation to children's developing emotional knowledge and autobiographical memory, from 36 to 60 months of age (N=100). Standardized tasks during the first two laboratory visits will include free play, pretend play, story-telling, and memory-sharing. Children's emotional knowledge will be assessed at the beginning and the end of the study. Their autobiographical memory will be assessed at the 48- and 60-month time points. It is expected that cultural differences in maternal interaction styles, including child-centered versus mother-centered play, positive and negative emotional responsiveness, maternal references to feeling states, and causal explanations about emotions, will predict cultural differences in children's emotional understanding, even with initial age and language skills factored out. In turn, children's emotional knowledge will uniquely predict their developing memory ability across the two preschool years. Divergent family socialization practices, evident early in children's lives, will lead to different levels of emotional understanding in children, which will further affect the content, style, and long-term accessibility of their autobiographical memories. Findings from this project will have great implications for current research on autobiographical memory development as well as for policy-making with regard to issues such as education and parenting.
| Wang, Qi (2016) Why Should We All Be Cultural Psychologists? Lessons From the Study of Social Cognition. Perspect Psychol Sci 11:583-596 |
| Wang, Qi; Doan, Stacey N; Song, Qingfang (2010) Talking about Internal States in Mother-Child Reminiscing Influences Children's Self-Representations: A Cross-Cultural Study. Cogn Dev 25:380-393 |
| Doan, Stacey N; Wang, Qi (2010) Maternal discussions of mental states and behaviors: relations to emotion situation knowledge in European American and immigrant Chinese children. Child Dev 81:1490-503 |
| Wang, Qi (2008) Emotion knowledge and autobiographical memory across the preschool years: a cross-cultural longitudinal investigation. Cognition 108:117-35 |
| Wang, Qi (2006) Relations of maternal style and child self-concept to autobiographical memories in chinese, chinese immigrant, and European american 3-year-olds. Child Dev 77:1794-809 |
