Robyn Fivush

Research

Fivush is most well known for her research on the complex interplay between children's storytelling abilities and their creation of autobiographical memories. According to Fivush, stories serve as an important cultural tool for expressing our understanding of feelings and beliefs and the ways in which a child constructs a story about an event is directly related to their internal representation of that experience.

Children learn how to enter into narrative discourse about the past through early conversations and social interaction. This social interactionist approach is based on a dialectical model in which the child internalizes adult thought through participation in joint activities where memories are experienced and shared. During social transactions, the child begins to understand the structures necessary for storing, organizing, and recalling memories.

Research has identified two main parent communication styles: paradigmatic (characterized by repetitive questioning and a focus on categorical information) and elaborate (characterized by evaluative commenting that included information such as cause, motivations, emotions and mental states). Fivush suggests that a child's exposure to one type of narrative over another may result in a similar narrative organization in the child. Fivush conducted research indicating that mothers who used more evaluations and emotional comments during parent-child conversations about the past have children who included more evaluative and emotional information in their own autobiographical narratives later on.

Fivush suggested that in conversations with a parent about a past experience, the child may recognize that the feelings and thoughts that they had about the experience differ from their parent's feelings, by direct comparison of what each person brought to the conversation. Hence parent-guided reminiscing helps children to organize, interpret, and evaluate past experiences in ways that give them the chance to cultivate their sense of self.

Two approaches have been used in studies examining parent-child reminiscing about the past in an effort to answer the question “What does the mother contribute to the conversation?” The first focuses on the process through which the mother engages the child when talking about a previous emotional experience. Fivush and her colleagues describe two maternal styles of speech that are frequently used when conversing with young children: Mothers who exhibit a highly elaborative style provide a multitude of details about the event and foster their children's involvement in the conversation by evaluating what their child has to say. In contrast, mothers who display a highly repetitive style, tend to focus on a few details about the event, ask redundant questions of their child, and rarely encourage their child's participation in the conversation. Of these two maternal speech styles, elaboration has been found to be beneficial for children's development of autobiographical memory, literacy, narrative skills, theory of mind, and understanding of self and emotion. Children of highly elaborative mothers are more elaborative themselves when recollecting previous experiences. Other research has shown that mothers of girls are more elaborative than mothers of boys and, in turn, girls are more elaborative than boys.

The second approach focuses on content, examining maternal speech for the specific subject matter introduced to the conversation. The content approach has been primarily used to investigate gendered patterns in maternal speech as they relate to children's speech. For example, Fivush and colleagues observed that mothers talked more about emotions with girls than boys, especially when those conversations concerned experiences of sadness. Other research has shown that by the end of preschool, girls tend to talk more about emotions, and sadness in particular, when compared to boys.

Fivush has also created a scale that examines children's knowledge of their family history using 20 Yes/No questions. In this study, Fivush and her colleagues argue that knowledge of one's family history is correlated with multiple positive aspects of well-being, including higher self-esteem, better family functioning, and lower anxiety. This scale has also gained interest and attention in mainstream media outlets.

Honors and awards

• Lilly Post-doctoral Teaching Award, 1985–86
• William Evans Fellow, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, Spring 2000
• Fellow, American Psychological Association
• Fellow, Association for Psychological Science