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Previous research has demonstrated that females include more emotional content in their autobiographical narratives than do males. The present study extends this research by examining the emotional content of adolescents’ narratives about their parents’ childhood experiences. 37 racially and ethnically diverse 14- to 16-year old adolescents narrated stories about their parents’ childhoods. The narratives were coded and analyzed for number and valence of emotion words. Results indicated children use more negative emotion overall and use more specific negative emotion in their narratives.
Background
• Previous studies have found that females use more emotion language in their autobiographical narratives than males (Bauer, Stennes & Haight, 2003).
• Many studies have found that mothers and fathers tend to use more emotion words with their daughters than they do with their sons when reminiscing (Fivush, Brotman, Buckner, & Goodman, 2000).
• There has been very little research on how parents talk about their own childhood experiences with their children.
• Mothers talk about social events
• Fathers talk about autonomous events
• Fiese and Bickman proposed that parents use stories of their growing up experiences as opportunities for socialization:
o Convey messages about being close to others
o Doing good work
o Striving for independence
• Mothers use more emotion words in the context of describing family than do fathers.
Objectives
Do children show similar gender differences when narrating parents’ childhood experiences as when they narrate their own experiences?
Hypotheses
1. Girls will include more emotional content in their narratives of their parents' childhood experiences than boys would.
2. Both girls and boys will include more emotional content when narrating their mothers’ childhood experiences than their fathers’.
Participants
37 children between the ages of 14 years old and 16 years old, with 18 being male and 14 being female.
Narratives
Adolescents were asked to recount two narratives of their mothers’ childhood experience and two narratives of their fathers’ childhood experience. The narratives were counter balanced.
Coding
The narratives were reliably coded for the following:
Number of emotion words used
Valence: positive (ex. Proud) or negative (ex. Nervous).
Focus: either general (ex. Bad) or specific (ex. Angry).
Analysis
2(gender of child) X 2(gender of parent) X 2(valence of emotion) X 2(focus)
Mixed model ANOVA, with gender of child being a between subjects factor and gender of parent, valence of emotion, and focus of emotion as within subjects variables on the number of emotion words.
The main effect of valence F(1,30)=5.10, p<.05, indicated that children used more negative emotion (mean=1.75) than positive emotion (mean=1.19). Interaction between valence and focus F(1,30)=6.30, p,.05, indicated that children use more negative specific emotion overall (mean=1.03).
Although past research has shown that there is a gender difference in the amount of emotional content that is used between autobiographical narratives of females and males, there was not a difference in the amount of emotional content used when adolescents retold their parents’ childhood experiences. Perhaps, both boys and girls are using more negative emotion words than positive emotion words because they find humor in retelling a negative childhood experience about their parents. Possibly, parents are sharing these negative stories with their children to share with them valuable life lessons that they learned as a child. Perhaps a larger sample size will indicate the expected results of the hypothesis.
This material is based upon work that has been supported by the National Science Foundation Award # 0450303 (Subaward # I-66-606-63 to Emory University). I would like to sincerely thank Dr. Robyn Fivush for giving me the opportunity to gain some research experience in her lab. Thank you Widaad Zaman and Mary Ukuku for assisting me in the laboratory with any questions I may have had.
I looked at the emotional words that adolescents use when describing their parents’ childhood experiences. This study found that adolescents use more negative emotion words, such as “angry” or “bad”, when retelling their parents’ childhood. Also, adolescents use more negative specific emotion words, such as “weird”, “angry”, and “disgusted.”
Quantitative and qualitative research
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