TY  - JOUR
A1  - Raffington, Laurel
A1  - Falck, Johannes
A1  - Heim, Christine
A1  - Mather, Mara
A1  - Shing, Yee Lee
T1  - Effects of stress on 6-to-7-year-old children’s emotional memory differs by gender
T2  - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, accepted manuscript
N2  - Understanding effects of emotional valence and stress on children’s memory is important for educational and legal contexts. This study disentangled the effects of emotional content of to-be-remembered information (i.e., items differing in emotional valence and arousal), stress exposure, and associated cortisol secretion on children’s memory. We also examined whether girls’ memory is more affected by stress induction. A total of 143 6- and 7-year-old children were randomly allocated to the Trier Social Stress Test for Children (n = 103) or a control condition (n = 40). At 25 min after stressor onset, children incidentally encoded 75 objects varying in emotional valence (crossed with arousal) together with neutral scene backgrounds. We found that response bias corrected memory was worse for low-arousing negative items than for neutral and positive items, with the latter two categories not being different from each other. Whereas boys’ memory was largely unaffected by stress, girls in the stress condition showed worse memory for negative items, especially the low-arousing ones, than girls in the control condition. Girls, compared with boys, reported higher subjective stress increases following stress exposure and had higher cortisol stress responses. Whereas a higher cortisol stress response was associated with better emotional memory in girls in the stress condition, boys’ memory was not associated with their cortisol secretion. Taken together, our study suggests that 6- and 7-year-old children, more so girls, show memory suppression for negative information. Girls’ memory for negative information, compared with that of boys, is also more strongly modulated by stress experience and the associated cortisol response.
KW  - Emotional memory
KW  - Stress
KW  - Cortisol secretion
KW  - Children
KW  - Arousal
KW  - Gender
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/68608
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-686080
UR  - https://www.psychologie.uni-frankfurt.de/121032885/Raffington_JECP_accepted_k.pdf
N1  - This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Laurel Raffington, Johannes Falck, Christine Heim, Mara Mather, Yee Lee Shing, Effects of stress on 6- and 7-year-old children’s emotional memory differs by gender, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 199, 2020, 104924, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104924.
© 2020. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
VL  - 2020
IS  - 199, art. 104924
SP  - 1
EP  - 41
ER  -