Emotion in Memory and Development: Biological, Cognitive, and Social Considerations: 24 (Series in Affective Science)

The question of how well children recall and can discuss emotional experiences is one with numerous theoretical and applied implications. Theoretically, the role of emotions generally and emotional distress specifically in children's emerging cognitive abilities has implications for understanding how children attend to and process information, how children react to emotional information, and how that information affects their development and functioning over time. Practically speaking, increasing numbers of children have been involved in legal settings as victims or witnesses to violence, highlighting the need to determine the extent to which children's eyewitness reports of traumatic experiences are accurate and complete. In clinical contexts, the ability to narrate emotional events is emerging as a significant predictor of psychological outcomes. How children learn to describe emotional experiences and the extent to which they can do so coherently thus has important implications for clinical interventions.

Jodi A. Quas is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on memory development and children's involvement in the legal system. She has addressed important questions regarding how stress affects children's memory, children's suggestibility, consequences of testifying in court on children, and children's emerging testimonial competence. She has received numerous awards for the theoretical and applied significance of her research, including the 2008 Award for Scientific Early Career Contributions in Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Robyn Fivush is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of The City University of New York in 1983 and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Human Information Processing, University of California, San Diego from 1982 to 1984. She joined the Emory faculty in 1984 where she is also associated faculty in the Department of Women's Studies. Her work focuses on early memory with an emphasis on the social construction of autobiographical memory and the relations among memory, narrative, identity, and coping.