Online Supplement
Reminiscing Quantity.
Each utterance (subject-verb proposition) was coded for the presence/absence of four types of elaboration: Wh-questions, Y/N questions, elaborative statements, and confirmations. Examples of each follow:
Wh- Questions included open-ended questions such those asking what, where, who, when, why, and how: “What did we do there?” “Who were we with?” “Where did we stay that night?”
Y/N- Questions were questions elicited a yes or no response from the child: “Did we go to watch something that day?” “Did you like it?”
Elaborative Statements were statements provided by the mother than introduced new memory information or details to the conversation: “We went to the parade” “Your cousins came with us” “I think you were really happy”
Confirmations were maternal validations of child contributions to the conversation: “Yes, Grandma was with us” “That’s right” “You have a good memory”
Reminiscing Quality.
For reminiscing quality ratings, all four mother-child reminiscing conversations were viewed on video (not just read from the transcript), and ratings were based on the entire interaction. As such, individual transcript excerpts/examples are difficult to provide. Instead, more detailed descriptions of the lowest and highest values for two individual scales are provided as examples below. Scoring examples are paraphrased from the Autobiographical Emotional Events Dialogues: Coding Manual by Koren-Karie and colleagues (2003), where complete rating scale scoring information may be obtained.
Maternal acceptance and tolerance of the child’s emotions. At the low end of the scale, a score of 1 was characterized by an interaction that included long silences, maternal interruptions of child’s talk, frequent topic changes, high criticism or maternal domination of the conversation without allowing the child to express him/herself. At the high end of the scale, a score of 9 was given when the mother listened carefully to and was tolerant of the child’s ideas, she strove to understand the child’s perspective about each event, encouraged the child to elaborate and suggest ideas in a positive manner; the mother exhibited pleasure and/or joy from the child’s cooperation and contributions to the conversation and may praise the child for his/her good ideas.
Overall coherence. At the low end of this scale, a score of 1 was given when the dialogue was characterized by a lack of coherence; specifically, the dyad construct four stories that are confused and have many oscillations or bizarre themes. More than one story does not match the emotion/topic they were supposed to describe and in some stories the mother and child ignore the emotions. Or, mother and child only provide titles for the stories with no further elaboration such as “I was happy on my birthday” as the entire event discussion; in these cases coherence is very poor despite the title matching the emotion because of a total lack of elaboration. At the high end of the scale, a score of 9 is given when the mother and child construct four stories that are highly coherent; these stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, are fluent and are clear. Further, the stories match the emotions they were asked to describe and both mother and child are involved and interested in the task.
Self Representations
The presence/absence of children’s positive and negative self- representations of self were coded for each utterance (subject-verb proposition) throughout the task.
Positive self-representations included instances where the child described the self as displaying or receiving affection, or displaying empathy/helping, compliance, or affiliation. Examples include “I am nice to my friend”; “I love my baby sister.”
Negative self-representations involved instances of aggression, noncompliance, and shame. Examples include: “I don’t listen”; “I hit him”, but were rarely coded.
Non-codes: Additional utterances that did not include positive or negative self-representations as defined above received no codes. Examples include “I am a boy”, “I am four years old”, and “I like cereal”.