Elaine Reese

University of Otago · Department of Psychology

The life story is a special cognitive-communicative format which allows understanding persons from a biographical perspective through autobiographical reasoning and life narrating. Reviewing research on the development of the life story from the past 15 years, we clarify the conceptual and developmental specificity of the life story by comparing it...

The present research explores the role of family structure and maternal reminiscing in childhood amnesia in middle childhood (age 7–11 years). Children from non-nuclear (solo parent, blended, extended; n = 13) or nuclear families (two biological parents; n = 13) were interviewed about their two earliest memories; they also reminisced with their mot...

This longitudinal intervention assessed children's memory at 2(1/2) years (short-term posttest; N=115) and their memory and narrative at 3(1/2) years (long-term posttest; N=100) as a function of maternal training in elaborative reminiscing when children were 1(1/2) to 2(1/2) years. At both posttests, trained mothers were more elaborative in their r...

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize research on picture book reading with young children (i.e., children under the age of 3). In this paper, we review cross-sectional, longitudinal, and intervention reading research and describe changes in both parental and children’s behaviors during picture book reading from birth to age 3. Research relate...

This study investigated long-term consistency and change in maternal style for talk about the past and relationships of those styles with children's memory participation. Nineteen white, middle-class mother-child dyads talked about shared past events at four time points: when children were 40, 46, 58, and 70 months of age. Across the four time poin...

This study investigated the role of temperament in oral language development in over 200 Mandarin and Cantonese speakers in the Growing Up in New Zealand pre-birth longitudinal cohort study. Mothers assessed infant temperament at nine months using a five-factor Infant Behaviour Questionnaire-Revised Very Short Form. They also reported on children’s...

The quantity and quality of educator-child talk in early childhood education plays a critical role in children’s language development. This study analysed the linguistic aspects of educator-toddler interactions in 24 New Zealand early childhood classrooms, sampling 25 minutes of naturally occurring interaction across five contexts: book-reading, me...

Purpose There is a dearth of information on cultural perceptions of children's language development for ethnic minorities in New Zealand to guide service provision. The current study explored differences across ethnicities in mothers' report of language concern and child language scores within a complex cultural, social, educational, and political...

To test the transmission of mental health difficulties from mother to child, we examined mediation through emotion reminiscing conversations and child language. Maternal depression symptoms were measured at 9 months post-partum, and child mental health outcomes were measured at age 8 years. Emotion reminiscing conversations between 1,234 mother-chi...

Background Many people fear failure and making mistakes. This fear can be transmitted from parents to children, suggesting that parental communication regarding failures and setbacks may play a critical role in shaping a child's perception of mistakes. Aims In this study, we investigated how everyday parent‐child conversations about setbacks influ...

For parents of preschoolers, parent education typically aims to support children's transition to school. A module of the Tender Shoots parent-mediated preventive intervention called Rich Reading and Reminiscing (RRR) encourages elaborative parent-child interactions during shared reading and reminiscing. One year after participation in a preschool r...

New Zealand has a growing population of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers, including children with speech, language, and communication disorders. However, the absence of language development profiles poses challenges in effectively identifying and addressing these concerns. This study aimed to capture the current state of monolingual, bilingual, and...

Maternal depressive symptoms (MDS) in the postnatal period may impact children’s later development through poorer quality parent-child interactions. The current study tested a specific pathway from MDS (child age 9 months) to child receptive vocabulary (4 ½ years) through both self-reported and observed parent-child verbal interactions (at both 2 a...

The way that mothers talk about the past (reminisce) with young children is linked to key memory, language, and socioemotional outcomes. The present research explored the role of a range of child, maternal, socioeconomic, and cultural factors that predict maternal reminiscing style, with a particular focus on maternal personality and child temperam...

Introduction Oral language skills are associated with children’s later self-regulation and academic skills; in turn, self-regulation in early childhood predicts successful functioning later in life. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the separate and combined effectiveness of an oral language intervention (Enhancing Rich Conversatio...

This research provides insight into current te reo Māori (the Indigenous language of Aotearoa, New Zealand) use in English-medium ECE settings. We videoed naturalistic conversations between kaiako (educators) and tamariki (aged 15–28 months) at 24 English-medium BestStart ECE centres. Te reo Māori was quantitatively assessed across five routines: k...

This study evaluated a parent‐mediated preventive intervention for children’s literacy skills 1 year after participation. Parents of 3½ to 4½‐year‐old‐children ( n = 69) recruited through early childhood centers were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (a) a target shared reading condition emphasizing phonological awareness ( Strengthenin...

Memory is essential for everyday life. The understanding and study of memory has continued to grow over the years, thanks to well controlled laboratory studies and theory development. However, major challenges arise when attempting to apply theories of memory function to practical problems in society. A theory might be robust in explaining experime...

The aim of the present study was to explore how maternal reminiscing relates to socioemotional development during middle childhood. Specifically, analyses explored the link between maternal reminiscing and children’s internalizing (emotional problems and peer problems), externalizing (hyperactivity and conduct problems) and prosocial behavior withi...

New Zealand is distinct from many other countries in that its government structure is relatively “flat,” which should make it easier to create national-level change. Indeed, applied cognitive psychology research has helped to drive change on a number of fronts, such as driving, early childhood education, and the criminal justice system. Here, we re...

Stories that have not been personally experienced by children and are only told by their parents are called vicarious family stories. An emerging body of literature has shown that vicarious family stories are an important part of children’s narrative ecology. However, to date, only two studies from the same cross-cultural project have examined the...

Background Oral language skills are associated with children’s later self-regulation and academic skills; in turn, self-regulation in early childhood predicts successful functioning later in life. Yet research to date has not tested the combined benefits of interventions for oral language and self-regulation skills. Objective The primary objective...

The recent proliferation of mobile technology has dramatically changed the media landscape experienced by today’s preschool children, which presents an opportunity to re-appraise the predictors of screen time for children in this age group. Previous research conducted by Beyens and Eggermont has shown mothers’ life logistics to be longitudinally pr...

Tender Shoots is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) for parents aimed at improving preschool children's oral language skills relevant for later reading. Parents of 72 preschool children (M = 50 months) were randomly assigned to either a Rich Reading and Reminiscing (RRR) condition, a Strengthening Sound Sensitivity (SSS) condition, or an Activity-...

Parent–child interactive shared reading can benefit young children’s language and emergent literacy skills; however, studies of programs to enhance shared reading often do not evaluate lasting effects after the transition to primary school. In this randomized control study, 69 parents of 3.5–4.5-year-old children participated in one of three condit...

The current study is an emerging adult follow-up of a longitudinal intervention study of maternal reminiscing (Growing Memories; N = 115). Mothers in the intervention condition were taught elaborative reminiscing skills when their children were 1.5–2.5 years old. We tested long-term effects of the intervention for emerging adults’ turning-point nar...

We assessed the rate of abstract talk of parents and their children across two days of naturally occurring speech. We hypothesized that 1) parents would use more abstract talk than children, and 2) parents’ abstract talk would predict children’s abstract talk at one-year follow-up. Thirty-five two-parent families with preschoolers wore a recorder f...

Introduction: Parental elaborative reminiscing supports young children's autobiographical memory, narrative, and socioemotional skills. Objective: This study is an adolescent follow-up of a reminiscing intervention in which 115 primary-caregiver mothers of toddlers were randomly assigned to a control group (n = 59) or to receive training in elab...

As screens become even more embedded in the everyday lives of young children, understanding the predictors of screen time becomes increasingly important. Our study investigated the predictors of total screen time on a weekday for children at two years of age using data from the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal (GUiNZ) study. Our selection of...

Tender Shoots compared two book-reading and conversation approaches for parents and preschoolers to an activity-based control group. The Rich Reading and Reminiscing (RRR) condition taught parents to converse about the storyline; the Strengthening Sound Sensitivity (SSS) condition taught parents to converse about word sounds. A total of 69 families...

Our aims were to (a) examine whether emerging adults on the schizophrenia spectrum (schizotypy) differed from non-spectrum peers in social, emotional, and academic adjustment to university; and (b) determine the role of the basic and narrative selves in adjustment. Schizotypy (n = 30) and non-schizotypy comparison (n = 29) participants, who were se...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistakes. The likelihood ratios for the regression tables were incorrect and a rounding error had been applied to the p values, which we have corrected in the revised tables.

The fusion of personal and group identities can lead to self-sacrificial progroup behavior, from acts of charity to violent extremism. Two pathways to identity fusion—via shared biology and shared experiences—have been proposed. In this article, we elucidate a new developmental account of the origins and mechanisms of these two pathways to identity...

The relationships between screen media use and hot and cool executive functioning (EF) and inattention/hyperactivity during the preschool years were assessed using data from mothers, fathers and children (N = 3787) participating in the Growing Up in New Zealand study. Patterns of screen time (i.e., whether children exceeded 2 hr of screen time at 2...

General Audience Summary In everyday life, our family members frequently tell us their stories of events that we did not directly experience—called vicarious memories or vicarious family stories. A burgeoning wave of evidence shows that vicarious family stories not only connect us with our family, society, and the wider world, but also play a signi...

Although there is a growing body of literature examining the positive aspects of being a parent, very few studies have considered the highlights mothers experience in parenting their infants. In particular, neither mothers’ own perceptions of the highlights of parenting infants nor the factors that increase the odds of mothers experiencing these hi...

Aim: Phenomenological researchers argue that schizophrenia spectrum disorders are primarily disorders of the basic self. To test this argument, we compared self-report and lexical measures of basic self-disturbance between schizophrenia spectrum (high-schizotypy) and non-spectrum groups (low schizotypy). Methods: From an initial sample (n = 310) s...

Depressed people have reduced ability to recall specific autobiographical memories, yet the role of reduced memory specificity in the development of adolescent depression is unclear. Two reasons are the limited longitudinal studies with this age group and the dominant use of just one measure of memory specificity, the Autobiographical Memory Test (...

General Audience Summary Autobiographical memories are vital for our sense of self and well-being, and culture shapes how we integrate these personal memories into our personal identity. Intergenerational narratives from one’s family, such as the stories adolescents know and tell about their parents’ childhoods, also contribute to identity developm...

Research Findings Home-based early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a popular form of small-group ECEC, with potential to facilitate high-quality conversations during shared book reading. To investigate how home-based early childhood educators (ECEs) take advantage of learning opportunities, educators read two storybooks with children (35.5–5...

Does the experience of childbirth create social bonds among first-time mothers? Previous research suggests that sharing emotionally intense or painful experiences with others leads to “identity fusion,” a visceral feeling of oneness with a group that predicts strong forms of prosocial action and self-sacrifice for other group members. This study co...

Extra-textual talk during shared picture book-reading is hypothesized to scaffold children’s early literacy skills; however, observational research has shown mixed results. This study compared meaning- and code-focused talk in rhyming versus non-rhyming picturebooks in relation to children’s language and literacy skills. Forty-five parents were aud...

Do adolescents remember imaginary companions (ICs) from early childhood? Researchers interviewed 46 adolescent participants in a prospective longitudinal study about their ICs from early childhood (age 5½). The existence of one or more ICs was documented in early childhood for 48% of children (G. Trionfi & E. Reese, 2009). At age 16, most adolescen...

The home-learning environment (HLE) is critical for young children's early learning skills, yet little research has focused on HLEs in indigenous communities. This study examined the role of the HLE of 41 whānau (New Zealand Māori families and community) in relation to their young children's (M = 4 years, 4 months) early learning skills. Parents we...

Natural disasters are disruptive to families and communities, particularly when cascading effects continue over time. Such events, and ensuing disruptions to family life, present risks to young children's development, including oral language. Recognition of this potential vulnerability has led to calls for early childhood programming to support par...

This study investigated the memory characteristics of vicarious family stories. Seventy-two families including three generations of women and men from different samples of families were recruited. Results can be described in three main sections: (a) intrafamilial similarities; (b) gender differences; and (c) cross-generational differences. For intr...

Introduction Research with adults and older adolescents has found that people exhibiting higher narrative coherence in life stories also report higher psychological wellbeing; however, this link has not been investigated longitudinally. The current study investigated concurrent and longitudinal relationships in mid‐adolescence between narrative coh...

Families preserve and rewrite history in ways that pass on to the next generation a sense of family history based on what is known and what cannot be told. In this paper, we analyze New Zealand European adolescents’ stories about their parents’ childhood, exploring how these young people tell and do not tell family stories shrouded in secrecy. We i...

General Audience Summary This study examines how children reminisce about the past with different members of their family. Reminiscing amongst families is remarkably common, and may play an important role in supporting children’s developing autobiographical memories. Research shows that mothers who reminisce with their children using an “elaborativ...

ISBN: 978-0-9951240-9-7

Parents’ elaboration plays an important role in autobiographical memory and socioemotional development. Two types of coding approaches have been used to assess parents’ elaboration: a frequency-based coding (absolute frequencies of different types of elaborative utterances) and a scale-based coding (a 5-point scale based on relative frequencies of...

This long-term follow-up of an early childhood training study (Growing Memories) to promote elaborative reminiscing tested continued effects on mother-child reminiscing and on adolescents' narrative coherence. Of the original 115 families, 100 participated when their children were 3.5 years of age and 76 participated when their children were young...

To determine if a weak narrative self is a core feature of schizophrenia or if it is the result of experiencing the clinical symptoms of the disease, we examined the narrative self of those at high psychometric risk for schizophrenia (HR). Following a screening procedure (n = 310), 80 undergraduate students (39 at HR) wrote personal narratives abou...

Narrative forms are a tool for organizing lived experience, reflecting both the structure of the experience in the world, and the individual’s reactions to that experience; Labov (1972) termed these as referential and evaluative dimensions. We investigated how four individuals narratively structure their stories across these formal narrative compon...

Researchers and teachers explored a new form of teacher–child interactions in two early childhood settings as a means of eliciting complex language. The primary mode of assessment in New Zealand early childhood education takes the form of ‘learning stories’ that teachers write, with photos, and that are collected into a portfolio book. Eight teache...

This commentary applauds the authors of the monograph, The Mother–Child Attachment Partnership in Early Childhood: Secure Base Behavioral and Representational Processes, for their thorough and elegant exploration of the development of attachment working models in the preschool years in relation to maternal sensitivity and attachment representations...

Narrative self in youth at high risk for developing schizophrenia

This prospective longitudinal study traced changes and individual differences in childhood amnesia over adolescence. A sample of 58 adolescents were followed from age 1-1/2 to age 16 years across 8 timepoints. At ages 12 (n = 46) and 16 (n = 51), adolescents completed an early memory interview. Early childhood measures included children’s self-awar...

Previous research suggests that (a) individual differences in reading and language development are stable across childhood, (b) reading and vocabulary are intertwined, and (c) children's oral narrative skill contributes to later reading comprehension. Each of these three phenomena is assessed using a longitudinal design spanning 15 years, from when...

Maternal elaborative reminiscing supports preschool children's autobiographical memory, self-concept, and emotion understanding. What are the factors contributing to mothers' elaborative style of reminiscing? In a longitudinal community sample (n = 170 at the final data point), this study explored the role of maternal depression (8–44 months), mate...

The aim of this study was to examine the aspects of the narrative self in people at high risk for developing schizophrenia. Thirty-nine high-risk participants and forty healthy controls (M = 20.83 years, SD = 1.28 years) narrated a turning point event in their life. It was hypothesized that the high-risk individuals would differ from controls in th...

Preliminary findings of self-disturbance in youth with high schizotypy

Background Phenomenological researchers argue that schizophrenia is first and foremost a disorder of the basic sense of self (also known as ipsity, minimal or core self), that is, of the immediate, pre-reflective, embodied sense of being immersed in the world. According to the self-disorder model, impairment of the basic sense of self precedes clin...

Being a parent of an infant is full of challenges, yet little is known about how child, mother, family, or socio-contextual factors relate to mothers’ self-identified challenges. Mothers of infants from a large (N = 6383) representative longitudinal sample of New Zealand children and their families were asked to report their biggest challenge over...

Much information in our lives is remembered in a social context, as we often reminisce about shared experiences with others, and more generally remember in the social context of our communities and our cultures. Memory researchers across disciplines and subdisciplines are actively exploring collaborative remembering. However, despite this common in...

Much information in our lives is remembered in a social context, as we often reminisce about shared experiences with others, and more generally remember in the social context of our communities and our cultures. Memory researchers across disciplines and subdisciplines are actively exploring collaborative remembering. However, despite this common in...

We examined earlier oral narrative and decoding and later reading in two samples spanning the first four years of reading instruction. The Year 1 sample (n = 44) was initially assessed after one year of instruction (M = 6; 1 years) and followed through their third year (M = 8; 1 years); the Year 2 sample (n = 34) assessed after two years of instruc...

Combining motherhood and paid work presents a significant challenge for many women. We asked 2388 working New Zealand mothers of infants about their biggest highlight and challenge since the birth of their child. Thematic analysis revealed the top three reported highlights were Enjoyment of the Child (40%), Child Development (29%) and Attributes of...

This study explored links between narrative identity, personality traits, and well-being for 263 adolescents (age 12-21) from three New Zealand cultures: Māori, Chinese, and European. Turning-point narratives were assessed for autobiographical reasoning (causal coherence), local thematic coherence, emotional expressivity, and topic. Across cultures...

This study assessed the status of te reo Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand, in the context of New Zealand English. From a broadly representative sample of 6327 two-year-olds ( Growing Up in New Zealand ), 6090 mothers (96%) reported their children understood English, and 763 mothers (12%) reported their children understood Māori. Parent...

Infants are increasingly cared for by adults other than their parents. Here we describe non-parental infant care within a diverse cohort; and investigate the relationship between parents’ antenatal intentions and actual infant care. 6822 New Zealand women were recruited during pregnancy and asked about their intentions for childcare. Non-parental c...

Adolescents’ intergenerational narratives—the stories they tell about their mothers’ and fathers’ early experiences—are an important component of their identities (Fivush & Merrill, 2016; Merrill & Fivush, 2016). This study explored adolescents’ intergenerational narratives across cultures. Adolescents aged 12 to 21 from 3 cultural groups in New Ze...

The Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised Very Short Form (IBQ-R VSF; Putnam, Helbig, Gartstein, Rothbart, & Leerkes, 2014 ) is a newly published measure of infant temperament with a 3-factor structure. Recently Peterson et al. ( 2017 ) suggested that a 5-factor structure (Positive Affectivity/Surgency, Negative Emotionality, Orienting Capacity, Af...

The Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised-Very Short Form (IBQ-R VSF; Putnam, Helbig, Gartstein, Rothbart, & Leerkes, 2014 ) is a new publicly available measure of infant temperament measuring positive affectivity/surgency (PAS), negative emotionality (NEG), and orienting and regulatory capacity (ORC). Although the initial psychometric properties o...

Parents’ aspirations shape children’s development. In this study, over 6700 pregnant women and over 4300 of their partners from the Growing Up in New Zealand cohort responded to a question about their hopes, dreams, and expectations for their unborn children. Responses were coded according to a Maslowian hierarchy of needs. Mothers and their partne...

In this narrative review, we suggest that children?s language skill should be targeted in clinical interventions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in the preschool years. We propose that language skill predicts childhood emotional and behavioral problems and this relationship may be mediated by children?s self-regulation and e...

Longitudinal cohort studies have significant potential to inform policy across a range of child and family areas, including early childhood education and care. Here we describe the relationship between policy-makers and New Zealand’s contemporary pre-birth cohort study. We outline a model for policy interaction that highlights the relationship betw...

Differences in parent-child interactions have implications for a range of developmental outcomes that are of interest to large longitudinal cohort studies. We describe a new method for observing parent-child conversations specifically designed to be a component of a more comprehensive collection of data about child health and development. Participa...

The New Zealand curriculum, Te Whāriki, suggests, " adults should read and tell stories, provide books and story times to allow children to exchange and extend ideas… " (p.73). Understanding how such narrative experiences are provided for within kindergarten is an aim of this study. Formal and informal, planned and spontaneous storytelling experien...

Parents talk about the past with their young children from the time their children can talk. There is robust evidence that when parents discuss the past in a detailed, emotional, and collaborative way (elaborative reminiscing), their children have stronger autobiographical memory skills. We review recent research showing that elaborative reminiscin...