Suchergebnisse

This was an exploratory study assessing how parents talk about salient child experiences, namely injuries serious enough to require hospital ER treatment. Preschool-aged (2–5 years) and school-aged (8–13 years) children were recruited from a hospital ER, and their parents were interviewed a few days later about their children's experience. The free recall portion of interviews are assessed here. Narratives of mothers and fathers differed little, but both parents were more elaborative, i.e., more descriptive and informative, when they talked about the injury of their daughters vs. their sons. Narratives about daughters were also more cohesive and included more context-setting information, i.e., orientation to where and when events occurred. Narratives about older children were also longer, more elaborative, more cohesive, and more contextually embedded than were those about younger children. Although the amount of explicit emotion descriptors did not differ, fathers tended to emphasize the absence of an emotional reaction by their sons, but not their daughters. Results were discussed in terms of concordance with gender stereotypes that describe males as tough and females as fragile. (Narratives, Gender, Parents, Story-telling)

The narratives of children (2-13 years) who had experienced trauma injuries requiring hospital Emergency Room treatment were analyzed for coherence. Specifically, the degree to which the children embedded their accounts within both an orienta-tive and evaluative context was assessed as well as whether they organized their narratives around high points. In addition, distress of the children at both time of injury and of treatment was rated on a 6-point scale by parents. There were qualitative as well as quantitative changes in the narratives of children at different ages. As well, the children who were more distressed produced less coherent accounts. While 9-13-year-olds who were most upset produced more orientative propositions, highly distressed 2-3-year-olds produced fewer, and all age groups produced fewer evaluative propositions as distress increased. It was proposed that this pattern of decreased evaluation resembled the affect flattening found in victims of posttraumatic stress syndrome. As well, the changes in coherence across the preschool years were discussed in terms of their possible contribution to the phenomenon of infantile amnesia. (Psychology)