In this series of projects, we are examining similarities and differences in how individuals narrate highly stressful and traumatic events in their lives.

Children's memories of Hurricane Andrew

In this project, we examined relations among stress, children's recall, and psychological functioning following Hurricane Andrew a devastating storm that destroyed the Florida coast in 1992. Three- to 4-year old children were interviewed about the hurricane immediately after the storm and 6 years later, when they were 9-10 years of age. Stemming from previous work, we were especially interested in the emotional and cognitive content of their recall. At the initial interviews, children who were more stressed included less positive emotion, fewer cognitive processing words, and provided less free recall and less information overall. In contrast, children who initially recalled more information showed better psychological outcome immediately following the hurricane. Six years later, children who had been more stressed initially included more negative emotion and more cognitive processing words, but provided less information during free recall. Children who had initially used more positive emotion words and recalled more information showed better psychological outcome 6 years later. This suggests that highly traumatic events experienced early in childhood may have long term consequences for later psychological well-being. Most striking, as implied by their narratives of the hurricane event given years later, those children who experienced the highest levels of stress were still trying to process and understand the stressful event. Just as impressive, children whose immediate recall was suggestive of more emotional processing and better understanding exhibited better psychological functioning in the years following the event.

For more information, see our recent publications:

Fivush, R., Sales, J.M. , Goldberg, A., Bahrick , L.E., & Parker, J.F. (2004). Weathering the storm: Children's long-term recall of Hurricane Andrew. Memory, 12, 104-118

Sales, J.M., Fivush, R., Parker, J., & Bahrick, L. (in press). Stressing meory: Relations of children's memory of Hurricane Andrew, stress and psychological well-being over time. Journal of Cognition and Development.

Narratives of negative and positive events

Women’s memories of emotional events differing by both valence and intensity were examined for differences in narrative content and structure, as well as subjective memory ratings. Emotional valence was related to the content of the women’s narratives, and emotional intensity was related to subjective ratings of the memories. Negative narratives contained more negative emotion, cognitive processing words, and passive sentences than positive narratives, and positive narratives contained more positive emotion words and were more complex, and intensely positive events, in general, as more coherent. Women rated both intensely negative and intensely positive events, in general, as more frequently talked/thought about, significant, unique, emotional, and vivid than moderately emotional events, and negative events were rated as more emotional than positive narratives. There was little relation between the objective content of the narratives and the women’s subjective ratings of their memory experiences. Finally, researcher-defined traumatic events did not differ from other intensely negative events. The results of this study have important implications for narrative research in general, methodological issues such as the validity of text analysis programs and subjective memory ratings, and the quality of traumatic memories.

For more informantion, see our recent publications:

Fivush, R., Hazzard, A., Sales, J.M., Sarfati, D., & Brown, T. (2002). Creating coherence out of chaos? Children's narratives of emotionally negative and positive events. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17(1), 1-19.

Sales, J.M., Fivush, R., & Peterson, C. (2003). Parental reminiscing style for positive and negative events. Journal of Cognition and Development, 4(2), 185-209.

Bohanek, J., Fivush, R., & Walker, E. (2004). Memories of positive and negative events. Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Fivush, R., & Wang, Q. (in press). Emotion Talk in Mother-Child Conversations of the Shared Past: The Effects of Culture, Gender, and Event Valence. Journal of Cognition and Development.