A new study published in the Journal of Child Development looked at autobiographical memory for the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, psychological adjustment, and their relation over time.
“We were interested in getting some insight on how children and adolescents thought about and remembered their lockdown experiences,” study author Dr. Tirill Fiellhaugen Hjuler from the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Aarhus University Hospital told us. “The Covid pandemic and associated isolation policies provide a unique opportunity to study the effects of a global phenomenon on children’s memories and well being.”
There is a good amount of literature from adults that show that people who have depressive symptoms have a harder time remembering their past experiences in detail and we wanted to test the hypothesis that lack of detail could be a marker of psychological difficulties in children.
“Autobiographical memory is an important aspect of our life,” Dr. Hjuler told us. “It allows us to make sense about our experiences and understand who we are. Therefore, we thought it would be particularly important to examine changes in autobiographical memory over time for a particularly meaningful and disruptive period, that is when children’s daily lives were interrupted by lockdowns.”
The research team measured autobiographical memory and psychological adjustment over the course of one year. They found that the content of memories lost detail over time and emotional valence. Also, they found that children’s and adolescents’ mental health decreased over time, and that adolescent females fared the worst.
“The most interesting finding had to do with the relation between memory and mental health over time,” Dr. Simona Ghetti from the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis told us. “We found that children and adolescents whose narratives contained more negative emotional content and included more factual information about COVID-19 and the resulting restrictions, fared the worst over time.”
The researchers did not expect to find a decrease in the negative emotional content over time, because they thought that children would continue to see those earlier experiences as difficult or upsetting. Despite this decrease in negativity at the sample level, the participants whose narratives were rated as conveying greater negative emotionality did worse over time, underscoring the importance of that early emotional content for participants’ well-being.
“These results underscore the importance of examining autobiographical memory as a way to gain insight onto how children think about their experiences,” Dr. Ghetti told us. Next, we will examine how the experience of the pandemic shapes the way they think about their future. Children’s narratives provide a very unique perspective on how children experience their world and respond to the challenges and opportunities they face.”