Abstract

This study examined the relationship between negative emotional response and memory in children. The subjects were 52 kindergarterners and the mean age of them was 5 years and 8 months. A writing task was presented to each subject. The task which seemed to be very tedious to children consisted of rewriting the sentences which a child's own mother made and wrote, and the task lasted about 20 minutes. The children's responses during the rewriting the sentences were videotaped and coded in terms of five categories per one minute from the weakest emotional response as one and the strongest emotional response as five. Twenty subjects showed almost no negative emotional behavior. To compare with these children, 20 subjects who showed strong negative emotional response from the strongest in order. A memory task was given to all the subjects as soon as they finished the rewriting the sentences. The memory task was that a child's own mother read a picture story telling book to the child and asked a question about the story. As a result, it was found that the recall scores of the children who showed strong negative emotional response were significantly higher than the scores of the children who showed almost no negative emotional response. It was suggested that this result could be interpreted in terms of these theoretical approach.