Background In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central importance of socioemotional skills in positive child development has become even more apparent. Prevalent models of emotion socialization emphasize the importance of parent-child talk as a critical socialization context. Purpose Autobiographical reminiscing about the child's lived experience may be a particularly effective form of parent-child conversation that facilitates emotion understanding. Method The authors provide a theoretical and empirical review of how maternal reminiscing style impacts specifically on emotion socialization in both typically and atypically developing children. Results Individual differences in maternal reminiscing indicate that highly elaborative reminiscing is related to both better narrative skills and higher levels of emotion understanding and regulation both concurrently and longitudinally. Intervention studies indicate that mothers can be coached to be more elaborative during reminiscing and coaching leads to higher levels of emotion understating and regulation. Conclusions Reminiscing about lived experience allows mothers and children to explore and examine emotions in personally meaningful situations that have real world implications for children's evolving emotion understanding.

It has been argued that, for certain people, attempts at making meaning about past life events, especially challenging events, might be detrimental to well-being. In this study we explored the association between narrative indicators of meaning-making and psychological well-being, while also considering the role of individual level factors such as life history, personality characteristics and locus of control, among an at-risk sample of low socioeconomic status inner-city African-American adolescent females with challenging lives. We found that having a more external locus of control and including more cognitive processing language in narratives about a highly negative past experience were associated with increased depressive symptoms. Our findings suggest that certain types of narrative meaning-making language may reflect ongoing and unsuccessful efforts after meaning, and, may be more similar to rumination than to resolution. Additionally, they support claims that for certain individuals from challenging backgrounds, efforts after meaning might not be psychologically healthy.

BACKGROUND: The structure of trauma memories impacts mental health, but questions remain about how structure changes with time and may shape coping with trauma. This study considered the structure of trauma narratives collected during an emergency department (ED) visit and at one-year follow-up. We addressed change in narrative structure over time, the extent structure predicted twelve-month psychological symptoms, and possible mechanisms in coping responses. METHODS: Sixty-eight community adults (age range 18-67; 41% women) recruited from a trauma center ED provided narratives of the traumatic event that brought them to the ED. Participants provided multiple follow-up reports on psychological symptoms and coping strategies, and another narrative of the traumatic event at twelve months. RESULTS: Narrative structure improved over time. Baseline narrative structure was negatively associated with twelve-month depressive and posttraumatic symptoms. Two measures of trauma narrative structure-interpretive elaboration and coherence-predicted change in coping strategies. Interpretive elaboration (rich details of the subjective experience) promoted early gains in endorsed engagement and later declines in endorsed disengagement. Coherence (the overall thematic structure of the narrative) buffered participant endorsement of disengagement at earlier follow-ups. Engagement was tied with fewer reported symptoms, whereas disengagement was associated with higher reported symptoms. Coping served as a mediator between baseline narrative structure and later mental health. LIMITATIONS: The study sample was relatively small and depended on self-reports for symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest there is meaningful variability in trauma memory structure, and early recollections of traumatic experiences may improve targeting of individuals in need of active interventions.

In this study, we considered connections between the content of immediate trauma narratives and longitudinal trajectories of negative symptoms to address questions about the timing and predictive value of collected trauma narratives. Participants (N = 68) were individuals who were admitted to the emergency department of a metropolitan hospital and provided narrative recollections of the traumatic event that brought them into the hospital that day. They were then assessed at intervals over the next 12 months for depressive and posttraumatic symptom severity. Linguistic analysis identified words involving affect (positive and negative emotions), sensory input (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell), cognitive processing (thoughts, insights, and reasons), and temporal focus (past, present, and future) within the narrative content. In participants’ same-day narratives of the trauma, past-focused utterances predicted greater decreases in depressive symptom severity over the next year, d = −0.13, whereas cognitive process utterances predicted more severe posttraumatic symptom severity across time points, d = 0.32. Interaction analyses suggested that individuals who used fewer past-focused and more cognitive process utterances within their narratives tended to report more severe depressive and posttraumatic symptom severity across time, ds = 0.31 to 0.34. Overall, these findings suggest that, in addition to other demographics and baseline symptom severity, early narrative content can serve as an informative marker for longitudinal psychological symptoms, even before extensive narrative processing and phenomenological meaning-making have occurred.