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We investigated whether selective discussion of autobiographical memory narratives would impact the quality of young people's recall of their nondiscussed memory narratives. Children (ages 8-9 years

The consequences of profound disruption to everyday life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will only emerge over time. Guided by ecological systems (Pitchik et al., 2021) and developmental psychopathology (Masten & Cicchetti, 2010) frameworks, I review evidence that points to parents at home with children as particularly vulnerable to increased psychological difficulties, particularly in contexts of poverty. Resultant compromised parenting may reduce children’s opportunities for the kinds of everyday interactions that promote cognitive and socioemotional development and expose them to increases in coercive, avoidant, and other problematic caregiving behaviours. I discuss three evidence-based strategies that parents could adopt to buffer their child’s mental health: building positive discipline strategies, talking with the child about the pandemic and its consequences, and conversing about the past. I conclude, however, that approaches to supporting parents and their children at this time must also address multisystem factors that compromise caregivers’ ability to provide nurturing care.

IntroductionOral language skills are associated with children’s later self-regulation and academic skills; in turn, self-regulation in early childhood predicts successful functioning later in life. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the separate and combined effectiveness of an oral language intervention (ENRICH) and a self-regulation intervention (ENGAGE) with early childhood teachers and parents for children’s oral language, self-regulation, and academic functioning.Methods and AnalysisThe Best Start study (Kia Tīmata Pai in te reo Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand) is a cluster randomized controlled trial with teachers and children in approximately 140 early childhood centres in New Zealand. Centres are randomly assigned to receive either oral language intervention only (ENRICH), self-regulation intervention only (ENGAGE), both interventions (ENRICH + ENGAGE), or an active control condition. Teachers’ and parents’ practices and children’s oral language and self-regulation development are assessed at baseline at age 1.5 years and every 9-months to age 5, and academic performance at age 6. Teacher-child interactions will also be videotaped each year in a subset of the centres. Children’s brain and behavior development and parent-child interactions will be assessed every 6 months to age 6 years in a sub-group of volunteers.Ethics and DisseminationThe Best Start trial and the two sub-studies (Video Project; Brain and Behavior Development) have been approved by the University of Otago Health Ethics Committee (H20/116), and reviewed for cultural responsiveness by: the Ngāi Tahu Research Committee (University of Otago), the Māori Advisory Group (University of Auckland, Liggins Institute) and an internal cultural advisory group. Results will be disseminated in international and national peer-reviewed academic journals and communicated to local, national, and international organizations serving early childhood teachers, parents, and young children.Trial registrationThis trial is registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry (ANZCTR) as ACTRN12621000845831.Strengths and Limitations of This StudyStrength:The size and longitudinal design of this cluster RCT across early childhood will enable the assessment of the singular and combined effects of teacher-led oral language and self-regulation interventions on the development of children’s oral language, self-regulation, and academic functioning.Strength:The trial represents a partnership between a large provider of early childhood education (BestStart), an external implementation service (Methodist Mission Southern), and a consortium of academics (Emotion Regulation Aoetaroa/New Zealand) to provide a culturally responsive intervention with co-designed implementation with the early childhood education provider (BestStart); the use of a single national provider simplifies co-design and the implementation of the intervention.Strength:The efficacy of the interventions is assessed at multiple levels: via teacher and parent reports, behavioral observations, and measures of brain development (EEG/ERP).Limitation:Because of the large size of the main trial, those assessments are restricted to teacher- and parent-report instruments.Limitation:The single-provider feature with BestStart restricts the ability to collect primary outcomes on children who leave this service provider during early childhood.

Despite increasing support for the distinction between primary and secondary variants of callous-unemotional features in children with disruptive behavioural disorders, evidence about whether emotion recognition deficits are only characteristic of primary CU is inconclusive. We tested whether, in young children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD; N = 74), level of affective arousal moderated the association between CU and performance on behavioural measures of emotional abilities. The association between CU and emotion recognition abilities was dependent on the child's level of affective arousal with higher CU associated with poorer emotion recognition abilities for ODD children with lower affective arousal (r = - 0.49; p = .007) but not for those with higher levels (r = 0.03; p = .838). Our results replicate recent findings and give support to the notion that the primary CU variant is characterised emotionally by under arousal of affect, low affect dysregulation and impaired emotion recognition abilities.

The tendency to adopt an observer perspective (OP) when recalling autobiographical memories has been shown to be related to both avoidance and depression in adults. Very little research has examined this relationship in adolescents, however, and none of this work has adopted a longitudinal paradigm. This is an important gap in light of the marked escalation in rates of depression across the adolescent period. The current study therefore examined the concurrent and longitudinal (one year) relationships between observer perspective in the Minimal Instruction Autobiographical Memory Test (Mi-AMT; Debeer, E., Hermans, D.,Raes, F. (2009). Associations between components of rumination and autobiographical memory specificity as measured by a minimal instructions autobiographical memory test.

Introduction Research with adults and older adolescents has found that people exhibiting higher narrative coherence in life stories also report higher psychological wellbeing; however, this link has not been investigated longitudinally. The current study investigated concurrent and longitudinal relationships in mid-adolescence between narrative coherence (causal and thematic coherence) of turning point narratives and psychopathology (depressive symptoms and rumination) and psychological wellbeing (life satisfaction). Hypothesis one was that in concurrent analyses, narrative coherence would be negatively associated with psychopathology and positively associated with wellbeing. Hypothesis two was that higher narrative coherence would predict lower psychopathology and greater wellbeing over time. Method A sample of 132 adolescents (ages 14–18 years) wrote a narrative about a turning point event in their life and completed psychopathology and psychological wellbeing measures twice, approximately one year apart. Results Partial correlations on concurrent data showed that only causal coherence was associated with lower psychopathology and higher wellbeing. Longitudinal regressions showed that causal coherence predicted higher wellbeing one year later. Conclusions These findings suggest that causal coherence in life stories may play a causal role in increased life satisfaction over time for adolescents. Experimental research is required to further investigate this possibility.

This study compared the effects of mother-child reminiscing coaching on mothers of typically developing children (community sample) and mothers of children with conduct problems (clinical sample). It also tested whether intervention effects generalize to mothers' preferences for elaborative and mental-state oriented talk with their children in other contexts. Mother-child dyads (n = 88) in each sample were randomly allocated to condition: reminiscing intervention or active control. Pre-intervention, sample differences emerged. Mothers in the community sample were more elaborative during reminiscing than mothers in the clinical sample, and also expressed stronger preferences for elaborative talk in everyday contexts. Post-intervention, an intervention effect emerged. In both the community and clinical samples, mothers who had participated in the elaborative reminiscing intervention were more elaborative and emotion-focused during reminiscing than mothers in the active control condition. They also increased their preferences for elaborative and mental-state-oriented language in everyday contexts. While the mothers in the community sample remained more elaborative than mothers in the clinical sample, both experienced equivalent intervention gains. These findings highlight the value of reminiscing coaching for changing mothers’ interactional preferences and behaviours.

Background Accurate assessment of functional capacity, a predictor of postoperative morbidity and mortality, is essential to improving surgical planning and outcomes. We assessed if all 12 items of the Duke Activity Status Index (DASI) were equally important in reflecting exercise capacity. Methods In this secondary cross-sectional analysis of the international, multicentre Measurement of Exercise Tolerance before Surgery (METS) study, we assessed cardiopulmonary exercise testing and DASI data from 1455 participants. Multivariable regression analyses were used to revise the DASI model in predicting an anaerobic threshold (AT) >11 ml kg−1 min−1 and peak oxygen consumption (VO2 peak) >16 ml kg−1 min−1, cut-points that represent a reduced risk of postoperative complications. Results Five questions were identified to have dominance in predicting AT>11 ml kg−1 min−1 and VO2 peak>16 ml.kg−1min−1. These items were included in the M-DASI-5Q and retained utility in predicting AT>11 ml.kg−1.min−1 (area under the receiver-operating-characteristic [AUROC]-AT: M-DASI-5Q=0.67 vs original 12-question DASI=0.66) and VO2 peak (AUROC-VO2 peak: M-DASI-5Q 0.73 vs original 12-question DASI 0.71). Conversely, in a sensitivity analysis we removed one potentially sensitive question related to the ability to have sexual relations, and the ability of the remaining four questions (M-DASI-4Q) to predict an adequate functional threshold remained no worse than the original 12-question DASI model. Adding a dynamic component to the M-DASI-4Q by assessing the chronotropic response to exercise improved its ability to discriminate between those with VO2 peak>16 ml.kg−1.min−1 and VO2 peak Conclusions The M-DASI provides a simple screening tool for further preoperative evaluation, including with cardiopulmonary exercise testing, to guide perioperative management.

Overgeneral autobiographical memory, the tendency to report general memories when asked to report specific event recollections, has been implicated in the development and maintenance of psychopathology. The dominant model of overgeneral memory, the CaR-FA-X model (Williams et al., 2007), proposes that three cognitive processes (increased rumination and avoidance, and reduced executive control) either independently, or in interaction, interfere with successful memory retrieval. Although psychopathology increases significantly during adolescence, no research has tested this model in its entirety, including interaction effects, longitudinally in community youth. We tested the model with 323 adolescents (152 females, 171 males) across four annual assessment points. Increased avoidance predicted higher proportions of overgeneral memories from Time 3 to Time 4, but this association was stronger for youth with elevated depressive symptoms across the four waves, and limited to memories generated in response to negative cue words. This finding may indicate that youth with stable higher levels of depression remember in an overgeneral way to avoid re-elicitation of negative event-related emotions. In youth with lower depression levels across time, the CaR-FA-X mechanisms did not predict overgeneral memory.

Abstract. Grit, that is, perseverance and passion for long-term goals, is a novel construct that has gained attention in recent years ( Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007 ). To date, little research has been performed with the goal of identifying the antecedents of grit. Thus, in order to fill this gap in the literature, self-report data were collected to examine whether mindfulness, a mindset of being-in-the-present in a nonjudgmental way, plays a role in fostering grittiness. Three hundred and forty-three undergraduate students completed an online survey once in a cross-sectional study, and of these, 74 students completed the survey again 4.5 months later. Although the cross-sectional analyses identified a number of positive associations between mindfulness and grit, the longitudinal analysis revealed that the mindfulness facets of acting with awareness and non-judging were the most important positive predictors of grit 4.5 months later. This set of findings offers implications for future grit interventions.

We investigated the concurrent relationships among life story variables (autobiographical reasoning), cognitive variables (negative explanatory style, cognitive reappraisal strategies, and rumination), and psychopathology (symptoms of depression and anxiety). Narratives of life story high, low, and turning points were collected from 164 young adults. Findings for negative self-event connections are reported here. Young adults who made some, as opposed to no, negative self-event connections reported greater symptoms of depression and anxiety and were more likely to report higher levels of ruminative thinking and less likely to use adaptive cognitive reappraisal strategies. Whether participants drew negative self-event connections predicted depression over and above the variance explained by negative explanatory style and cognitive reappraisal strategies and interacted with explanatory style to predict depression. In contrast, negative self-event connections did not incrementally predict anxiety over and above the cognitive variables. Results are discussed in terms of our current understanding of the factors that predict psychological distress.

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a transdiagnostic process associated with numerous emotional disorders. Most measures of RNT are disorder-specific, limiting utility in comorbid populations. Transdiagnostic measures of RNT have been developed in adults and are associated with anxiety and depression. However, a transdiagnostic measure is needed to assess RNT in adolescents as a potential vulnerability factor for emotional disorders. This study validates a transdiagnostic measure of RNT—Repetitive Thinking Questionnaire–10 (RTQ-10)—in adolescents ( N = 840, Mage = 15.7 years). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a unidimensional structure. The RTQ-10 manifested good internal consistency and measurement invariance across genders and age. RNT was equally associated with anxiety and depression symptoms irrespective of gender or age. Convergent validity was demonstrated by correlations with disorder-specific measures of RNT. These findings support the RTQ-10 as a reliable and valid transdiagnostic measure of RNT in adolescents.

While maternal elaborative reminiscing has been found to be positively connected to children's emotion competencies, little is known about how the quality of maternal talk during mother-child talk about shared emotion events relates to emotional competencies in children with disruptive behavioural disorders. In this study of 68 four to eight year-olds with oppositional defiant disorder and 34 children without a diagnosis there was no evidence of differences between mothers of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) children and mothers of non-ODD children in their use of emotion descriptors and open-ended questions when discussing emotion events with their child. After controlling for child age, gender, expressive verbal abilities and number of conversational turns, the more the mothers used these devices the poorer child's ability to generate causes for emotions and the lower the child's emotion regulation ability. The association for child emotion regulation was moderated by child's diagnostic status with a notable relationship for ODD mother-child dyads but not for the other group. The implications of the findings for the conceptualisation of mother-child talk and its relationship to the development of emotion competencies in children with disruptive behavioural problems are discussed.

Background: The latest version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) proposes a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis reduced to its core symptoms within the symptom clusters re-experiencing, avoidance and hyperarousal. Since children and adolescents often show a variety of internalizing and externalizing symptoms in the aftermath of traumatic events, the question arises whether such a conceptualization of the PTSD diagnosis is supported in children and adolescents. Furthermore, although dysfunctional posttraumatic cognitions (PTCs) appear to play an important role in the development and persistence of PTSD in children and adolescents, their function within diagnostic frameworks requires clarification. Methods: We compiled a large international data set of 2,313 children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years exposed to trauma and calculated a network model including dysfunctional PTCs, PTSD core symptoms and depression symptoms. Central items and relations between constructs were investigated. Results: The PTSD re-experiencing symptoms strong or overwhelming emotions and strong physical sensations and the depression symptom difficulty concentrating emerged as most central. Items from the same construct were more strongly connected with each other than with items from the other constructs. Dysfunctional PTCs were not more strongly connected to core PTSD symptoms than to depression symptoms. Conclusions: Our findings provide support that a PTSD diagnosis reduced to its core symptoms could help to disentangle PTSD, depression and dysfunctional PTCs. Using longitudinal data and complementing between-subject with within-subject analyses might provide further insight into the relationship between dysfunctional PTCs, PTSD and depression.

Depressed people have reduced ability to recall specific autobiographical memories, yet the role of reduced memory specificity in the development of adolescent depression is unclear. Two reasons are the limited longitudinal studies with this age group and the dominant use of just one measure of memory specificity, the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986). In the current one-year longitudinal study, community adolescents (N = 132, M = 16.13 years at Time 1) wrote about a life turning point, and their narratives were coded with respect to the amount of episodic and semantic detail. Participants also completed an adapted version of the Minimal Instructions AMT. Greater episodic detail in young people's turning point narrative was positively associated with depressive symptoms separately at Times 1 and 2, and uniquely predicted increases in depressive symptoms across the year. A non-positive valence of the turning point resolution also positively predicted Time 2 depressive symptoms. In contrast, specificity as assessed by the AMT did not predict such an increase. The results suggest that episodic detail in highly self-relevant narratives may be a sensitive predictor of increases in adolescent depressive symptoms across time. We consider excessive self focus and retrieval style as potential explanations of our findings.

In this narrative review, we suggest that children's language skill should be targeted in clinical interventions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in the preschool years. We propose that language skill predicts childhood emotional and behavioral problems and this relationship may be mediated by children's self-regulation and emotion understanding skills. In the first sections, we review recent high-quality longitudinal studies which together demonstrate that that children's early language skill predicts: (1) emotional and behavioral problems, and this relationship is stronger than the reverse pattern; (2) self-regulation skill; this pattern may be stronger than the reverse pattern but moderated by child age. Findings also suggest that self-regulation skill mediates the relation between early language skill and children's emotional and behavioral problems. There is insufficient evidence regarding the mediating role of emotion understanding. In subsequent sections, we review evidence demonstrating that: (1) particular kinds of developmentally targeted parent-child conversations play a vital role in the development of language skill, and (2) some current clinical interventions, directly or indirectly, have a beneficial impact on children's vocabulary and narrative skills, but most approaches are ad hoc. Targeting language via parent-child conversation has the potential to improve the outcomes of current clinical interventions in the preschool years.

Parents talk about the past with their young children from the time their children can talk. There is robust evidence that when parents discuss the past in a detailed, emotional, and collaborative way (elaborative reminiscing), their children have stronger autobiographical memory skills. We review recent research showing that elaborative reminiscing also has significant benefits for children’s language and socioemotional skills. Importantly, these findings show that elaborative reminiscing is effective with children at risk of compromised development in the context of poverty, maltreatment, or psychopathology. Elaborative reminiscing appears to foster development by providing children with practice using challenging language, encouraging them to put their experiences into words, and optimizing memory for the information gained during conversations. Although further research in diverse cultures is required, reminiscing is a promising tool—available to all families—for promoting children’s cognitive and socioemotional development.

The Children's Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory (CPTCI) is a self-report questionnaire that measures maladaptive cognitions in children and young people following exposure to trauma. In this study, the psychometric properties of the CPTCI were examined in further detail with the objective of furthering its utility as a clinical tool. Specifically, we investigated the CPTCI's discriminant validity, test-retest reliability, and the potential for the development of a short form of the measure. Three samples (London, East Anglia, Australia) of children and young people exposed to trauma (N = 535; 7-17 years old) completed the CPTCI and a structured clinical interview to measure posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms between 1 and 6 months following trauma. Test-retest reliability was investigated in a subsample of 203 cases. The results showed that a score in the range of 46 to 48 on the CPTCI was indicative of clinically significant appraisals as determined by the presence of PTSD. The measure also had moderate-to-high test-retest reliability (r = .78) over a 2-month period. The Children's Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory-Short Form (CPTCI-S) had excellent internal consistency (α = .92), and moderate-to-high test-retest reliability (r = .78). The examination of construct validity showed the model had an excellent fitting factor structure (Comparative Fit index = 0.95, Tucker-Lewis index = 0.91, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation = .07). A score ranging from 16 to 18 was the best cutoff point on the CPTCI-S, in that it was indicative of clinically significant appraisals as determined by the presence of PTSD. Based on these results, we concluded that the CPTCI is a useful tool to support the practice of clinicians and that the CPTCI-S has excellent psychometric properties.

We investigated whether selective discussion leads to retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) for early to mid-adolescents’ positive and negative autobiographical memories after delays of 5 min and 1 day. Adolescents (13–15 years of age; N = 58) completed an adapted version of the RIF paradigm for adults’ emotionally valenced autobiographical memories. Following findings that RIF occurs for children’s positive and negative memories and adults’ negative autobiographical memories only, we posed three research questions. First, would RIF occur for adolescents’ autobiographical memories after a short delay? Second, would adolescents demonstrate an RIF valence effect? Third, would any RIF findings be replicated after a longer delay? We found RIF for negative memories after both a short and longer delay. We also found RIF for positive memories, but only after the longer delay. The potential mechanisms underpinning these findings are discussed.

Strong theory and research implicates parent–child conversations about the past in the child’s development of critical skills, including autobiographical memory and understanding of emotion and minds. Yet very little research has focused on associations between reminiscing and the development of childhood psychopathology. This chapter considers what is known about reminiscing between parents and children where there is anxiety or conduct problems. These findings provide clues as to how children come to manifest difficulties in autobiographical memory and emotion competence. Thereafter, the text reviews studies that have attempted to alter the style and content of parent–child reminiscing in clinical populations. The full implications of parent–child reminiscing, as a rich context for children’s development, have yet to be realized in clinically relevant research.

Summary Background Functional capacity is an important component of risk assessment for major surgery. Doctors' clinical subjective assessment of patients' functional capacity has uncertain accuracy. We did a study to compare preoperative subjective assessment with alternative markers of fitness (cardiopulmonary exercise testing [CPET], scores on the Duke Activity Status Index [DASI] questionnaire, and serum N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide [NT pro-BNP] concentrations) for predicting death or complications after major elective non-cardiac surgery. Methods We did a multicentre, international, prospective cohort study at 25 hospitals: five in Canada, seven in the UK, ten in Australia, and three in New Zealand. We recruited adults aged at least 40 years who were scheduled for major non-cardiac surgery and deemed to have one or more risk factors for cardiac complications (eg, a history of heart failure, stroke, or diabetes) or coronary artery disease. Functional capacity was subjectively assessed in units of metabolic equivalents of tasks by the responsible anaesthesiologists in the preoperative assessment clinic, graded as poor ( 10). All participants also completed the DASI questionnaire, underwent CPET to measure peak oxygen consumption, and had blood tests for measurement of NT pro-BNP concentrations. After surgery, patients had daily electrocardiograms and blood tests to measure troponin and creatinine concentrations until the third postoperative day or hospital discharge. The primary outcome was death or myocardial infarction within 30 days after surgery, assessed in all participants who underwent both CPET and surgery. Prognostic accuracy was assessed using logistic regression, receiver-operating-characteristic curves, and net risk reclassification. Findings Between March 1, 2013, and March 25, 2016, we included 1401 patients in the study. 28 (2%) of 1401 patients died or had a myocardial infarction within 30 days of surgery. Subjective assessment had 19·2% sensitivity (95% CI 14·2–25) and 94·7% specificity (93·2–95·9) for identifying the inability to attain four metabolic equivalents during CPET. Only DASI scores were associated with predicting the primary outcome (adjusted odds ratio 0·96, 95% CI 0·83–0·99; p=0·03). Interpretation Subjectively assessed functional capacity should not be used for preoperative risk evaluation. Clinicians could instead consider a measure such as DASI for cardiac risk assessment. Funding Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, UK National Institute of Academic Anaesthesia, UK Clinical Research Collaboration, Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, and Monash University.

Summary We review research investigating the influence of conversations between parents and their children about past negative experiences on children's memory and management of their emotional experiences. To do so, we are guided by social cultural developmental theory and a developmental psychopathology framework. In the first section, we first discuss the ‘best case’ scenario, in which parents and child have a close relationship within which the child's negative emotions can be discussed and understood, and the child's ability to remember her experiences in a detailed and coherent narrative form is optimised. In the second section, we turn to the most problematic scenario of child maltreatment, including child sexual abuse, and consider the implications for children's memory when these optimizing factors are not present or are limited. Finally, we discuss exemplar intermediary scenarios. We propose that early problems acquiring critical skills for remembering emotional experiences in the context of parent–child relationships can have negative consequences for children's memory but also for their psychological functioning more broadly, which can extend across development. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Despite the important theoretical and applied implications, there is limited experimental research investigating the influence of emotional valence on young children's verbal recall of everyday emotional experiences. This issue was addressed in the current study. Specifically, we investigated young children's (5–6 years) recall of emotional experiences presented in six brief stories. To address methodological limitations of the small body of existing literature, we adopted a within participants design in which story content was matched and valence (positive, negative, neutral) was counterbalanced across stories. Fifty-four children were presented the six stories via narrated slideshow, and recall was assessed after delay. Results showed that emotional stories were better recalled than neutral stories and negatively valenced stories were better recalled than positively valenced stories. The recall advantage of negatively valenced information was found for all aspects of each story, suggesting that negative valence renders events particularly memorable.

This experiment investigated whether retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) would be found in children’s self-generated autobiographical memory recall. An adapted version of the RIF paradigm for adults’ autobiographical memories was administered to 8- and 9-year-old children (N = 65). We hypothesized that RIF would be found in terms of both number of memories recalled and amount of memory detail reported. The relationship between memory detail at the retrieval practice phase and RIF magnitude was also investigated. Consistent with hypotheses, RIF was found for both the number of memories recalled and the amount of memory detail reported. In addition, memory detail at retrieval practice was associated with increased RIF magnitude. Findings extend the current literature in three ways. First, they indicate that selective discussion of autobiographical events with children can cause forgetting of similar non-discussed events. Second, even when these non-discussed events are recalled, they contain sparser memory detail. Finally, when events are selectively discussed in greater detail, forgetting of similar non-discussed events occurs to a greater extent.

Reduced specificity of autobiographical memories is a hallmark of depressive cognition. Autobiographical memory (AM) specificity is typically measured by the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT), in which respondents are asked to describe personal memories in response to emotional cue words. Due to this free descriptive responding format, the AMT relies on experts' hand scoring for subsequent statistical analyses. This manual coding potentially impedes research activities in big data analytics such as large epidemiological studies. Here, we propose computerized algorithms to automatically score AM specificity for the Dutch (adult participants) and English (youth participants) versions of the AMT by using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. The algorithms showed reliable performances in discriminating specific and nonspecific (e.g., overgeneralized) autobiographical memories in independent testing data sets (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve > .90). Furthermore, outcome values of the algorithms (i.e., decision values of support vector machines) showed a gradient across similar (e.g., specific and extended memories) and different (e.g., specific memory and semantic associates) categories of AMT responses, suggesting that, for both adults and youth, the algorithms well capture the extent to which a memory has features of specific memories. (PsycINFO Database Record

Research suggests that an overgeneral autobiographical memory style (i.e., retrieval of general memories when instructed to retrieve a specific episodic memory) represents a vulnerability marker for depression. Although adolescence is a period of high risk for the emergence of depression, little research has investigated the associations among overgeneral memory, psychopathology, and risk factors longitudinally in a community sample in this age group. We, therefore, investigated overgeneral memory, psychopathology (depression and anxiety), and rumination (an established risk factor for psychopathology) longitudinally in 269 typically-developing youth (125 females, 144 males) across 3 annual assessment points. We sought to determine whether 1) overgeneral memory would predict psychopathology across the entire sample, and 2) whether associations would vary as a function of longitudinal rumination growth. Across the entire sample, overgeneral memory did not predict psychopathology. For youth who reported elevated, and increasing, patterns of rumination over time, transient relationships between overgeneral memory and subsequent increases in anxiety were found. We conclude that overgeneral memory may represent a vulnerability marker for adverse psychological outcomes only for youth at risk for psychopathology.

This pilot study aimed to compare the efficacy of a regular offering of the group-delivered Triple P-Positive Parenting Program for child behavior problems with an enhanced version tailored to promote child emotion competence. Families of children between ages 3 and 6 years displaying early-onset conduct problems were randomly assigned to Group Triple P (GTP; final n = 18) or Emotion Enhanced Triple P (EETP; final n = 18), in which parents were encouraged to incorporate emotion labels and causes and to coach emotion competence during discussions of everyday emotional experiences with their child. Compared with parents who received GTP, parents who received EETP increased their discussion of emotion labels and emotion causes in conversations with their child at postintervention, but this advantage was lost by the 4-month follow-up. Parents in the EETP condition also used more emotion coaching postintervention and at follow-up. There were no differences at postintervention or follow-up in children's emotion knowledge skills. Postintervention improvement in disruptive child behavior was greater for GTP, but the groups converged at follow-up. Parents were similarly satisfied with both interventions. Overall, EETP showed little advantage over regular GTP delivery.

The primary aim of this study was to investigate the influence of ambiguous verbal information on children’s verbal and behavioral fear response. We extended existing research by using a within participants design, comparing the influence of ambiguous information with threat information, and their association with interpretation bias measures relevant to a range of situations. 61 children (7–10 years) were allocated to one of two conditions in which they received either ambiguous or threat information about unfamiliar animals. Before and after the information, they completed a questionnaire rating their fear beliefs about the tagged animal and a no-information control animal. At post-assessment, the children also completed a task assessing their behavioral avoidance of the animals. Measures of interpretational bias and trait anxiety were given at baseline. Verbal threat information substantially increased fear beliefs and behavioral avoidance. Ambiguous information had a weak effect on children’s fear beliefs but no effect on behavioral avoidance. Overall, trait anxiety was not significantly related to interpretation biases, or the effect of ambiguous or threat information. In the threat group, but not the ambiguous group, interpretational bias measures were associated with relative increase in fear beliefs for the tagged animal, and with behavioral avoidance. These findings support the view that verbal information can influence children’s fear and that even mild ambiguous information can also have an effect.

Medical contexts provide a rich opportunity to study important theoretical questions in cognitive development and to investigate the influence of a range of interacting factors relating to the child, the experience, and the broader social context on children's cognition. In the context of examples of research investigating these issues, we consider several specific advantages of conducting research in medical settings: the diverse range of participants, experiences, and potential research paradigms and the opportunities for student training. We discuss the benefits and challenges of conducting research within medical contexts and consider ways of attempting to maximize the former and of addressing the latter.

Individuals higher on avoidant coping may remember fewer specific autobiographical memories and more nonspecific memories on the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) in order to protect themselves from the painful emotions accompanying some specific memories. Habitually remembering this way (overgeneral memory) may be a risk factor for depression. In Studies 1 and 2 (nondepressed samples), avoidant coping was associated with more specific memories and fewer overgeneral memories, at odds with the functional avoidance view. In Study 3 (depressed sample), there were no significant relationships between AMT indices and avoidant coping. Results are discussed in light of ironic process theory.

Most studies of emotion abilities in disruptive children focus on emotion expression recognition. This study compared 74 children aged 4–8 years with ODD to 45 comparison children (33 healthy; 12 with an anxiety disorder) on behaviourally assessed measures of emotion perception, emotion perspective-taking, knowledge of emotions causes and understanding ambivalent emotions and on parent-reported cognitive and affective empathy. Adjusting for child’s sex, age and expressive language ODD children showed a paucity in attributing causes to emotions but no other deficits relative to the comparison groups. ODD boys with high levels of callous–unemotional traits (CU) (n = 22) showed deficits relative to low CU ODD boys (n = 25) in emotion perspective-taking and in understanding ambivalent emotions. Low CU ODD boys did not differ from the healthy typically developing boys (n = 12). Impairments in emotion perceptive-taking and understanding mixed emotions in ODD boys are associated with the presence of a high level of CU.

This research adopted observational and experimental paradigms to investigate the relationships between components of emotion knowledge in three- to four-year-old children. In Study 1, 88 children were assessed on the Emotion Matching Task (Morgan, Izard, & King), and two tasks requiring the generation of emotion labels and causes. Most tasks were significantly associated with age and language ability, and similar tasks were significantly but moderately correlated. In Study 2, 58 of these children were allocated to one of three conditions: emotion cause talk, in which they received four sessions of training focusing on emotion labels and causes; non-emotion cause talk, focusing on causal relationships in general; or were allocated to a no-training control. Children in the emotion causes condition showed improvement in their use of emotion labels but not other components of emotion knowledge. The findings suggest that, in three- to four-year-old children, emotion knowledge is constituted by related but separable components and that training in emotion language targets separate rather than all aspects of emotion knowledge.

Summary Two experiments examined the effectiveness of non-verbal interview aids as means of increasing the amount of information children report about an event under conditions designed to mimic their use in the field. In the first study, 27 5–7-year-old children took part in an event, and 7–10 days later were interviewed using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Protocol interview followed by an opportunity to draw the event or complete puzzles and, in turn, a second verbal interview. New information was reported following both drawing and puzzles and accuracy declined in both conditions, but drawing did not differentially influence recall. In the second experiment, dolls or human figure diagrams were introduced to clarify children's (N = 53) reports of touch as recommended in by some professionals, with a verbal interview serving as a control. Props did not increase the amount of information reported compared with best practice verbal techniques, but nor did they elevate errors. The findings support the use of a second recall attempt, but do not support the use of non-verbal aids, even when these are used following professional recommendations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The authors investigated whether manipulating parents' goals regarding their discussion of an upcoming staged event with their 6-year-old children differentially influenced the children's recall. Parents (n = 62) were asked to prepare their child for a staged novel event—“visiting the pretend zoo”—to take place 1 day later. One group (inform) was asked to simply tell their child about the event, whereas a second group (discuss) was asked to engage their child in conversation and seek their child's perspective. A third group of parents (control) read an unrelated story to their child. Relative to parents in the control and inform conditions, parents in the discuss condition engaged their children in richer, more diverse, and complex conversation and their children made more contributions to the conversation. When their recall was tested 1 week later, however, children in the inform condition, relative to the discuss and control conditions, recalled more correct information overall. The reports of children ...

The present study examined the impact of training mothers in high-elaborative, emotional reminiscing on children’s autobiographical memory and emotion knowledge. Eighty mothers were randomly allocated to one of two training conditions: in the reminiscing condition, mothers were encouraged to reminisce by asking their children (aged 3.5 to 5 years) elaborative Wh- questions, providing detailed descriptions, and discussing emotions, and in the control condition, mothers were encouraged to play by following their children’s lead. Forty-four mothers completed the study. Both immediately and 6 months after training, mothers in the reminiscing condition and their children each made more high-elaborative utterances and emotion references during shared recall than did mothers in the control condition and their children. Children of reminiscing mothers also showed better emotion cause knowledge after 6 months than did children of control mothers, but children’s independent recall to an experimenter did not differ according to condition. The findings suggest that an elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing style can be taught to parents, with potential benefits for children’s shared (but not independent) memory contributions and for emotion knowledge development.

Correctional practitioners work within a context that is heavily influenced and constrained by punishment policies and practices. The overlap between the normative frameworks of punishment and offender rehabilitation creates a unique set of ethical challenges for program developers and therapists. In this paper we set out to briefly outline three major punishment theories and draw out their implications for correctional practitioners. First, we discuss the nature of punishment and the problems it poses for practitioners and all citizens in liberal democracies. Second, consequential, retributive, and communicative justifications of punishment are succinctly described and their clinical implications analyzed and some limitations noted. Finally we conclude with some suggestions for ethical practice in correctional settings.

To assess the effectiveness of providing training in elaborative, emotion rich reminiscing (emotional reminiscing, ER) as an adjunct to Parent Management Training (PMT) for parents of children (N = 38, M age = 56.9, SD = 15.8 months) with oppositional behaviors. Control parents received PMT and non-language adjunct intervention, child-directed play. All components of the intervention were manualized. Parents in both conditions received training in an abbreviated course of PMT. Parents in the ER condition additionally received brief training in discussing everyday past events with their child incorporating emotion labels and causes, "wh" questions, and detailed descriptive information. Parents in the control condition received training in allowing their child to lead during play sessions. Across both conditions, children's oppositional behaviors decreased between the beginning and end of training. Providing parents with training parents in an elaborative, emotion-rich reminiscing style resulted in greater parent and child use of elaborations and emotion references during shared conversations. Given findings in the literature of an association between parental emotion talk and children's emotional competence, developmental skills that are frequently compromised in oppositional children, the current pilot study has implications for interventions that broaden the focus of PMT.

We investigated the influence of preparation provided by parents on preschoolers' recall. One day before children participated in a staged novel event, parents discussed the event with their child either with (verbal+photos) or without (verbal) photographs. Parents and children in a control condition read an unrelated story. Then 8-10 days later the children were interviewed about the event. Children in the verbal+photos condition recalled significantly more than those in the control condition. Parental preparation style (e.g., evaluations, hypothetical language) was associated with the child's contributions to the preparatory discussion, but no aspect of parent or child style or content was associated with children's verbal recall. Similarly, there were no significant associations between children's performance on a task of episodic future thinking, and their preparatory discussion or recall, although episodic future thinking was strongly associated with language ability. The potential underlying mechanisms and theoretical implications are discussed.

This study indexed the relationship between acute stress disorder (ASD) and subsequent posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in injured children. Consecutive children between 7-13 years admitted to a hospital after traumatic injury (n = 76) were assessed for ASD. Children were followed up 6-months posttrauma (n = 62), and administered the PTSD Reaction Index. Acute stress disorder was diagnosed in 10% of patients, and 13% satisfied criteria for PTSD. At 6-months posttrauma, PTSD was diagnosed in 25% of patients who were diagnosed with ASD. Acute stress reactions that did not include dissociation provided better prediction of PTSD than full ASD criteria. These findings suggest that the current ASD diagnosis is not optimal in identifying younger children who are high risk for PTSD development.

This study examined the role of peritraumatic panic symptoms during trauma in childhood acute stress. Children (N = 60) who had suffered traumatic injury were administered the Child Acute Stress Reaction Questionnaire, the Child Depression Inventory, and the Physical Reactions Scale to index panic attacks that occurred during the trauma. Panic attacks were experienced during their trauma by 100% of participants with acute stress reactions and 24% of participants without stress reactions. Panic attacks during trauma accounted for 28% of the variance of acute stress reactions, with an additional variance accounted for by age, time since the accident, and dysphoria. These findings are discussed in terms of fear conditioning models of posttraumatic stress.

The Children's Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory (CPTCI) is a self-report questionnaire that measures maladaptive cognitions in children and young people following exposure to trauma. In this study, the psychometric properties of the CPTCI were examined in further detail with the objective of furthering its utility as a clinical tool. Specifically, we investigated the CPTCI's discriminant validity, test-retest reliability, and the potential for the development of a short form of the measure. Three samples (London, East Anglia, Australia) of children and young people exposed to trauma (N = 535; 7-17 years old) completed the CPTCI and a structured clinical interview to measure posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms between 1 and 6 months following trauma. Test-retest reliability was investigated in a subsample of 203 cases. The results showed that a score in the range of 46 to 48 on the CPTCI was indicative of clinically significant appraisals as determined by the presence of PTSD. The measure also had moderate-to-high test-retest reliability (r = .78) over a 2-month period. The Children's Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory-Short Form (CPTCI-S) had excellent internal consistency (α = .92), and moderate-to-high test-retest reliability (r = .78). The examination of construct validity showed the model had an excellent fitting factor structure (Comparative Fit index = 0.95, Tucker-Lewis index = 0.91, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation = .07). A score ranging from 16 to 18 was the best cutoff point on the CPTCI-S, in that it was indicative of clinically significant appraisals as determined by the presence of PTSD. Based on these results, we concluded that the CPTCI is a useful tool to support the practice of clinicians and that the CPTCI-S has excellent psychometric properties.

The Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) is widely used in research contexts to measure the extent to which participants (children or adults) report specific or general memories in response to cue words. Recalling fewer specific and more general memories (overgeneral memory) has been shown to be linked to depression in adults, but findings for youth, in particular, are mixed. Different versions of the AMT may be one contributing factor, yet this issue has received little research attention. The current study investigated the influence of reporting mode (written vs. spoken) on the specificity, length, and content of memories provided by 8- to 10-year-old children (N = 48). No significant differences were found in the number of specific responses given in the written and spoken modes. On the other hand, the spoken mode elicited longer and more detailed memories, although most content differences were eliminated when memory length was controlled. These findings suggest that different reporting modes can influence the nature of the memories reported, but the absolute differences are relatively small.

This experiment examined the impact of selective postevent discussion of high- and low-elaborative styles on 5- and 6-year-olds’ ( N = 47) memory for discussed and nondiscussed aspects of a staged event (“Visiting the Pirate”). The event contained both logically and arbitrarily connected scenes. Discussion was spaced over 3 days, and memory was assessed 1 day later. Compared with a no-discussion condition, memory for discussed information was enhanced after high- but not low-elaborative discussion for both logically and arbitrarily connected scenes. For arbitrarily connected scenes, memory for nondiscussed aspects was impaired relative to the no-discussion condition, with the degree of impairment being equal after high- and low-elaborative discussion. In contrast, for logically connected scenes, memory for nondiscussed information was not impaired after discussion of either style.

This study investigated the extent to which children’s negative information processing biases are pervasive across the cognitive modalities of attention, judgment, and memory and, further, whether such biases are specifically associated with anxiety, depression, and/or aggression. 133 children between the ages of 8 and 14 years were assessed on an attention allocation task, a vignette interpretation measure, and a memory recall task. Children also completed anxiety and depression inventories, and were rated by teachers on a measure of aggression. Overall the results suggested a predominantly pervasive negative bias associated with childhood psychopathology, with some evidence of specificity. The canonical correlation analyses indicated that high levels of anxiety, depression, and aggression were associated with biases: attention to negative information, interpretation of ambiguous situations as negative, and preferential recall of negative words. Above this general bias, anxiety displayed a specific association with attention to negative information in the univariate analyses.

The preschool years are a critical period for all aspects of child development, and any disruption to cognitive or socio-emotional functioning at this stage has potential repercussions for current and future functioning. There is, therefore, a need for clinical interventions that optimize the functioning of children at risk of psychological disorders. In the current paper, we review research showing that the way in which parents discuss everyday experiences with their young children has significant implications for the children's cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Specifically, mothers who engage their child in a rich elaborative style of talking about past experiences have children who also develop an elaborative style of remembering and reporting personal experiences. Evidence suggests that elaborative reminiscing can benefit children's social and self understanding, the quality of the parent-child relationship, and language and emergent literacy. Moreover, findings show that elements of the elaborative style can be identified and taught to parents. We propose that elaborative parent-child discussion about the past could form the basis of developmentally sensitive intervention during the preschool period.