Division of Arts and Sciences, New York University Shanghai, Shanghai, China.
Department of Educational Psychology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Memory. 2023 Oct;31(9):1244-1257. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2023.2254029. Epub 2023 Sep 12.
Research shows that parents' self-worth may be contingent on their children's performance, with implications for their interactions with children. This study examined whether such child-based worth is manifested in parents' recognition memory. Parents of school-age children in China ( = 527) reported on their child-based worth and completed a recognition memory task involving evaluative trait adjectives encoded in three conditions: self-reference, child-reference, and semantic processing. The more parents had child-based worth, the more they exhibited a child-reference effect - superior recognition memory of evaluative trait adjectives encoded with reference to the child rather than semantically. Parents exhibited the classic self-reference effect in comparisons of recognition memory between the self-reference and semantic processing conditions, but this effect was not evidenced among parents high in child-based worth. Only parents low in child-based worth exhibited the self-reference effect in comparisons between the self-reference and child-reference conditions. Findings suggest that when parents hinge their self-worth on children's performance, evaluative information related to children may be an elaborate structure in memory.
研究表明，父母的自我价值感可能取决于孩子的表现，这对他们与孩子的互动有影响。本研究考察了这种基于孩子的自我价值感是否体现在父母的识别记忆中。中国学龄儿童的父母（=527）报告了他们基于孩子的自我价值感，并完成了一项识别记忆任务，涉及在三种条件下编码的评价特质形容词：自我参照、孩子参照和语义处理。父母的基于孩子的自我价值感越高，他们表现出的孩子参照效应就越明显——对与孩子有关而非语义上编码的评价特质形容词的识别记忆更好。父母在自我参照和语义处理条件下的识别记忆比较中表现出经典的自我参照效应，但在基于孩子的自我价值感高的父母中没有表现出这种效应。只有基于孩子的自我价值感低的父母在自我参照和孩子参照条件之间的比较中表现出自我参照效应。研究结果表明，当父母将自我价值感寄托在孩子的表现上时，与孩子有关的评价信息可能是记忆中的一个精细结构。
