Early Impacts of College, Interrupted: Considering First-Year Students' Narratives About COVID and Reports of Adjustment During College Shutdowns.

The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened lives and livelihoods, imperiled families and communities, and disrupted developmental milestones globally. Among the critical developmental disruptions experienced is the transition to college, which is common and foundational for personal and social exploration. During college shutdowns (spring 2020), we recruited 633 first-year U.S. students (mean age = 18.83 years, 71.3% cisgender women) to provide narratives about the impacts of the pandemic. We tested the ways narrative features were associated with concurrent and longitudinal COVID stressors, psychosocial adjustment, and identity development. Narrative growth expressed in spring 2020 was positively associated with psychosocial adjustment and global identity development and was negatively associated with mental health concerns. Associations were supported concurrently and at 1-year follow-up. Growth partly explained associations between COVID stressors and students' adjustment. Our findings reinforce the importance of growth for resilience and underscore the importance of connective reasoning as people navigate a chronic stress.

Do Overgeneral Memories Make us feel better? An experimental examination.

A critical assumption of the CaR-FA-X model, that overgeneral memory is partly attributable to the "functional avoidance" of specific details about one's past experiences, has not been experimentally tested. Further, while it is assumed that the reinforcing properties of said avoidance leads to the emergence of an overgeneral recall style over time, this question has not been addressed developmentally. To explore these issues, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, 41 children and adolescents (Mage = 12 years) were randomly assigned to recall overgeneral or specific negative memories on the Autobiographical Memory Test; participants later listened to their memories and provided pre- and post-tests of their emotional states at four time points: before and after memory generation and before and after memory exposure. In Study 2, 52 college-aged participants (Mage = 19 years) completed the same protocol. Results indicated that children and adolescents in the overgeneral condition reported higher levels of positive affect relative to those in the specific condition, while recall condition did not impact adults' emotional states. These findings were not explained by differences in emotion regulation strategies or psychopathological symptoms. Implications for developmental models of autobiographical memory and emotion regulation are discussed.

Aligning Practice to Policies: Changing the Culture to Recognize and Reward Teaching at Research Universities.

Recent calls for improvement in undergraduate education within STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines are hampered by the methods used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. Faculty members at research universities are commonly assessed and promoted mainly on the basis of research success. To improve the quality of undergraduate teaching across all disciplines, not only STEM fields, requires creating an environment wherein continuous improvement of teaching is valued, assessed, and rewarded at various stages of a faculty member's career. This requires consistent application of policies that reflect well-established best practices for evaluating teaching at the department, college, and university levels. Evidence shows most teaching evaluation practices do not reflect stated policies, even when the policies specifically espouse teaching as a value. Thus, alignment of practice to policy is a major barrier to establishing a culture in which teaching is valued. Situated in the context of current national efforts to improve undergraduate STEM education, including the Association of American Universities Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, this essay discusses four guiding principles for aligning practice with stated priorities in formal policies: 1) enhancing the role of deans and chairs; 2) effectively using the hiring process; 3) improving communication; and 4) improving the understanding of teaching as a scholarly activity. In addition, three specific examples of efforts to improve the practice of evaluating teaching are presented as examples: 1) Three Bucket Model of merit review at the University of California, Irvine; (2) Evaluation of Teaching Rubric, University of Kansas; and (3) Teaching Quality Framework, University of Colorado, Boulder. These examples provide flexible criteria to holistically evaluate and improve the quality of teaching across the diverse institutions comprising modern higher education.

When Parents Know Little about What Happened: Parent-guided Conversations, Stress, and Young Children's Eyewitness Memory.

This study examined how 4- to 7-year-olds' memories for a stressor were influenced by conversations with a parent who had little knowledge of the target event, and the stress children experienced before, during, and after the event. Children (N = 43) watched a mildly stressful video before talking about it with a parent. Parents were asked to focus on either the children's feelings or the content of the video itself. A researcher interviewed the children about their memory following the conversation. Behavioral and physiological measures of children's stress were collected at multiple stages. Children recalled more inaccurate information with the parent than with the interviewer. Younger age and parent insecure attachment were associated with poorer memory. Manipulation of parents' emotion orientation did not predict memory, but individual differences in the talk did, although in different ways from what would be expected from research on conversations about shared events. Less stress (according to self-reported happiness and observed negative affect) before and after, but not during, the stressor was linked with better memory. Implications for children's memory in legal settings are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

More than pretty pictures? How illustrations affect parent-child story reading and children's story recall.

Previous research showed that story illustrations fail to enhance young preschoolers' memories when they accompany a pre-recorded story (e.g., Greenhoot and Semb, 2008). In this study we tested whether young children might benefit from illustrations in a more interactive story-reading context. For instance, illustrations might influence parent-child reading interactions, and thus children's story comprehension and recall. Twenty-six 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds and their primary caregivers were randomly assigned to an Illustrated or Non-Illustrated story-reading condition, and parents were instructed to "read or tell the story" as they normally would read with their child. Children recalled the story after a distracter and again after 1 week. Analyses of the story-reading interactions showed that the illustrations prompted more interactive story reading and more parent and child behaviors known to predict improved literacy outcomes. Furthermore, in the first memory interview, children in the Illustrated condition recalled more story events than those in the Non-Illustrated condition. Story reading measures predicted recall, but did not completely account for picture effects. These results suggest that illustrations enhance young preschoolers' story recall in an interactive story reading context, perhaps because the joint attention established in this context supports children's processing of the illustrations.

When and why does abuse predict reduced autobiographical memory specificity?

Two studies were conducted to explore the conditions that elicit autobiographical memory problems in abuse victims and the mechanism that underlie them. In Study 1 older adolescents (n=80) with and without self-reported abuse histories completed a modified version of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT-U); participants were given an unlimited amount of time to provide specific memories in response to cue words. Participants also completed measures of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), working memory, and attentional biases. This study found that abuse severity and PTSD symptoms were positively related to memory specificity on the AMT-U. In Study 2 older adolescents (n=78) with and without self-reported abuse histories completed the traditional (timed) version of the AMT. Participants also completed measures of working memory, attentional biases, self-reported coping, and psychopathological symptoms (i.e., depression and PTSD). In this study the opposite relationship was observed, such that abuse severity was related to poorer memory specificity, but this relationship was explained by disengagement coping and PTSD symptoms. This work suggests that poor memory specificity may represent a form of avoidance, but the application of avoidant mechanisms depends on the remembering context.

Do illustrations enhance preschoolers' memories for stories? Age-related change in the picture facilitation effect.

This study investigated whether illustrations facilitate story recall in preschoolers (N=58) 46 to 63 months of age. Each child was exposed to either a verbal story narrative with illustrations (Verbal and Picture condition), the narrative alone (Verbal Only condition), the narrative with uninformative illustrations (Verbal and Irrelevant Picture condition), or the illustrations alone (Picture Only condition). Children recalled the story immediately and after a 1-week delay. With increasing age, the Verbal and Picture group increasingly outperformed the other verbal groups, particularly when recalling central details conveyed by both narrative and illustrations. Performance did not vary among the three verbal groups at lower values of age, whereas the Verbal and Picture group recalled more than the other verbal groups at the older ages. Regardless of age, all verbal groups outperformed the Picture Only group, suggesting that preschoolers are unlikely to spontaneously generate a narrative from pictures alone.

The relations among abuse, depression, and adolescents' autobiographical memory.

This study examined the relations among early and recent experiences with abuse, depression, and adolescents' autobiographical memory in a longitudinal study of family violence. Participants' (N = 134) exposure to violence was documented when they were 6 to 12 years old and again when they were 12 to 18 years old. The second assessment included measures of depression and autobiographical memory for childhood experiences. Memory problems were more consistently related to current circumstances than childhood abuse history. For instance, depressive symptoms were associated with increased rates of "overgeneral" childhood memories. Recent exposure to family violence predicted more overgeneral memories, shorter memories, and lower rates of negative memories. The patterns suggest that adolescents currently stressed by depression or family violence might strategically avoid the details of past experiences to regulate affect.