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Examined influence of newly acquired information on 5- to 7-year-olds' memory and general representation of a personally experienced novel event. Found that advance information specific to the event led to better recall and better integration of the experience into a general event representation both soon after the event and 4 months later. General discussion of the topic without event-specific information neither enhanced memory nor facilitated integration of event information. (Author/KB)

Two experiments examined effects of event modality on young children's memory and suggestibility. Findings indicated that 5-year-olds were more accurate than 3-year-olds and those participating in the event were more accurate than those either observing or listening to a narrative. Assessment method, level of event learning, delay to testing, and variables relating to the misled items influenced misinformation effects. (Author/KB)

Five-year-old children proved more accurate than 3-year-olds about event narratives, and those participating were more accurate than those behaving passively. Magnitude of misinformation was influenced by level of event learning, assessment method, and delay in testing.

We investigated the conceptualization of suffering and well-being states pertaining to physical and psychological domains by examining children's and adults’ acceptance of coexistence of two co-occurring internal states. Children and adults decided whether pairs of states may coexist, justified their answers, and reported whether they had personal experience of that. The pairs of states could involve same valence and different domain, different valence and different domain, and different valence and same domain. The results showed that acceptance, plausibility, complexity, and causality of justifications vary depending on age and/or type of state co-occurrence. The role of factors like cognitive processing, personal experience, and asymmetric organization of the constructs of valence and domain is discussed, in light of the applied relevance of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim was to investigate how children conceptualize personal events of positive and negative valences pertaining to the physical and psychological domains. Five- to 9-year-olds narrated events referring to suffering states (Study 1, n = 112) and to suffering and wellbeing states (Study 2, n = 118). Analysis of the narratives revealed differences between the two states, with higher focus on events pertaining to a physical domain for suffering and to psychological domain for wellbeing; however, older children were more oriented toward psychological than physical events for both valences. Children showed higher tendency to produce causes compared to consequences, with younger children finding it difficult to introduce physical causes. Psychological suffering narratives revealed a richer psychological lexicon and more instances of domain coexistence. Asymmetry in the representation of different state valences and domains indicates multifaceted and developing conceptualization. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Previous literature documented the traumatic consequences of exposure to disasters on psychological functioning, but little attention has been paid to the intergenerational transmission of the memory of disasters. We explored long-term effects on the memory of the Vajont dam disaster in Northeast Italy that claimed 1,910 lives in 1963., Method: We collected data from 52 two-generation families in which the first generations were born before the disaster and the second generations after. The families were divided into an experimental group whose first generation survived the disaster and a control group whose first generation had moved there afterward. The interviews included an open-ended narrative on the memory of the disaster. We coded free narratives focusing on the richness of the memories (i.e., length, causes, core, aftermath), analyzing negative emotions and salience of the natural and psychological domains., Results: We applied generalized linear mixed models. The richness of the memories, including references to negative emotions, diminished with lower exposure and with intergenerational transmission. Moreover, the participants built a shared representation of the disaster that did not markedly differ across exposure or generation. The reported causes were attributed more to the natural rather than the human domain; the consequences more to the psychological compared to the material domain., Conclusions: Our findings highlight the processes through which collective memories of historical traumatic events are built over the long term and the way a collective identity develops to bear the burden of highly dramatic events and to transmit intergenerational lessons from the past. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).