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PRACTICE IMPACT STATEMENTThis study examines the autobiographical memories of 84 individuals convicted of sexual offences. Our results indicate that despite their adverse childhoods, chaotic families, and compromised social competence, justice-involved clients can engage meaningfully in longform narrative interviews that contain probing personal and reflective questions about their early lives. In fact, many participants expressed gratitude that they were invited to engage and share their experiences in this way. This pioneering interdisciplinary study has important practical implications for providers of psychotherapeutic treatment who work with custodial and community samples of people convicted of sexual offences. We conclude by emphasising the value of narrative therapy and present directions for future research.Most therapeutic approaches offered in correctional settings emphasise a cognitive behavioural approach intended to dismantle cognitive distortions. Our results suggest that the willingness and ability of justice-involved individuals to participate in narrative therapy has been likely underestimated. Accordingly, this study will help clients and clinicians alike to make the treatment experience more personalised and meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the interplay between historical events and personal memory, as reflected in literature and film about the radical movements in Kolkata during the 1970s. Topics include the depiction of revolutionary politics and its impact on individuals in films like Kaalbela and Calcutta My Love, the representation of historical memory in Akhtaruzzaman Elias's novel Khwabnama, and the critique of nationalist histories and the role of marginalized voices in shaping collective memory.

Gambling patterns among young people are diverse, yet factors that affect changes in their gambling behaviour as they mature remain poorly understood. This study explores gambling trajectories and related sources of influence during childhood, early adolescence and later adolescence, and amongst adolescents at different levels of gambling risk. Qualitative interviews and online communities with 89 Australians aged 12–17 years explored their gambling experiences, from childhood to the present. Reflexive thematic narrative analysis revealed that children often learn how to gamble through their parents. Parents, peers, sports interests, advertising and simulated gambling continue to transfer gambling knowledge and skills throughout adolescence. Gambling is further reinforced through social rewards and is highly normalised through advertising. At-risk/problem gambling adolescents tended to report positive early memories of gambling, but also harmful parental gambling. They reported having friendship groups where betting is highly normalised. They purposefully honed their betting knowledge to demonstrate skill, and also gambled with in-game items (skins). Conversely, non-gamblers reported very little exposure to parental gambling, mirrored their parents’ negative attitudes to gambling, were unlikely to have friends who gambled, and reported less interest in professional sport. Reducing youth gambling and gambling harm requires measures to tackle multiple layers of influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conveys how young adults reflect upon their childhood experiences and memories of outdoor play, friluftsliv and outdoor places. Inspired by a phenomenological approach, we conducted walking interviews in nature areas where they used to play as children, revisiting the same informants and places as in a research project 14 years earlier. Today the respondents emphasise the experience of freedom encompassing joy, wonder and communication with surrounding nature and people, associating it with autonomy and self-determination. Joy, wonder and communication in someone's experience are subjective existential categories often used to characterise friluftsliv in outdoor education. Personally meaningful to the young adults, these experiences have become important parts of who they are today. These results differ from previous research on outdoor play as it highlights freedom, joy and wonder. Based on this, we argue for facilitating self-directed outdoor play, and emphasize conscious choice of location for outdoor pedagogical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gendered experience of public space during childhood and adolescence, both in the global North and in the global South, creates asymmetries and inequalities between girls and boys in terms of levels of autonomy, opportunities for play and socialising, and sense of social safety. Young Architecture students, who grew up in a variety of settlements in Greece, were asked questions about the neighbourhood they lived in when they were 12 years old, an age that coincides with the end of middle childhood and the beginning of adolescence. The submissions included texts and/or maps, images, and free-hand drawings, describing everyday spaces and destinations, favourite journeys, places, and experiences. This paper focuses on the answers of girl students. The essays and visual boards (n = 50) reveal the matrix of different girlhoods, in conjunction to five different typologies of neighbourhoods: downtown districts, dense urban residential neighbourhoods, low-density urban residential areas, suburbs, and rural environments. Four main determinants, in terms of physical design, emerge as contributing to happy girlhoods: mixed uses on the ground floor, including commercial; traffic-calmed streets; availability of unprogrammed spaces close to home; and contact with nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the narrator's nostalgic and tumultuous childhood memories, highlighting their deep longing for a different life and their complex relationship with their surroundings and family. Topics include the narrator's reflections on old man Povaliy's harshness, their dreams of escaping to a better life, and the poignant transition from a cramped apartment to a new beginning.

In the modern history of Yunnan, a landlocked province in the southwest of China, the Kunming — Haiphong Railway profoundly shaped its geographic, political, and socioeconomic landscapes. Yunnan based artist Cheng Xinhao's recent art and research projects To the Ocean investigates modernity and (post)coloniality of Yunnan through intellectual reflections on the history of the Kunming — Haiphong Railway, bodily experience with the current railroad, and spiritual conversations with himself about childhood memories and geographical imaginations. By analyzing Cheng's visual works and writings in the project To the Ocean, this essay focuses on Cheng's three encounters on the Kunming — Haiphong Railway — the Wujiazhai Railway Bridge, Bisezhai Station, and China-Vietnam Railway Bridge — to elaborate the iterative power of colonial modernity, socialist revolution, and postsocialism in shaping the landscapes of the Tonkin — Yunnan cross-border area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the potential for using childhood memories shared on social media as a means of interrogating experiences of twentieth-century social historical geographies of home and family life. In so doing, the paper discusses briefly the value of children's perceptions as guests in others' homes as an insightful source of data, before exploring the value of social media as a place for sharing these recollections and accessing them as a researcher. The paper draws data from a thread on the popular UK-based parenting website and internet discussion space, 'Mumsnet', asking contributors to share the 'weirdest' thing they saw at someone else's house when they were a child. This paper positions social media research as an ethically, epistemologically and ontologically sound approach to creating data for geographical research, which has become well-established in other sub-disciplines. The paper seeks to explore what it is to remember intimate childhood experience alongside those whose memories might reflect or conflict with your own. Further, the paper addresses the way in which a social media thread created new narratives and uncovered long-buried memories which provide an insightful lens for exploring a particular domestic historical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used innovative transdisciplinary methods to describe the nature and extent of early childhood memories recalled by 84 adults convicted of sexual offences. The timing of the memories, level of detail recalled and way memories were recollected were largely consistent with extant memory research. One important finding, however, was that more than 30% of our participants recalled particularly traumatic and distressing childhood experiences – a much higher proportion than previously observed in nonoffending samples. The extent to which these memories laid the foundation for subsequent emotional content and feature in the evolution of cognitive schemata is not yet well understood. With that in mind, we consider the implications of our findings for the event centrality in self-narratives. We recommend the inclusion of treatment modalities that maximise as yet unrecognised and undervalued narrative inclinations and story-telling abilities of a complicated population of individuals with rich lived experience that stands to benefit greatly from such approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a personal exploration of the shoreline from Goodman Arts Centre to Katong Park, culminating in the creation of a performance piece called "tanjong katong." Topics explored include tracing the historical shoreline, encounters with various signs marking historical periods, and contemplations on familial ties and connections to the sea, emphasizing the fluidity and impermanence of boundaries and memories.

This article explores the possibilities that the study of personal memories offers to historians of education. All the arguments revolve around three questions: (1) What is your first memory? From this starting point we explore research dealing with autobiographical memories, both earliest and school memories, as well as future possibilities in educational historiography. (2) How would I like to be remembered? This question is related to the memories and archives of 'the forgotten' – in this case, schoolteachers ‒ and the role of historians as 'heirs' to these memories, in line with Walter Benjamin's metaphor. (3) What happens when personal memories become public? This question leads us to reflect on the processes that convert academic narratives into public discourse. When this occurs, the historian loses control of these narratives and is confronted with a dilemma: to become a public intellectual or to go back to the privacy of his/her archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, economic inequality in education is well-documented. However, less is known about the experiences of elementary school teachers who have broached issues of social class with their students. At the same time, the classed identity of teachers is still under-developed. This study takes a phenomenological approach to teacher subjectivity and examines how 57 New York City elementary school teachers narrated memories of class in their own childhoods and how such memories were linked to their perspectives on addressing economic inequality as it appears in their classrooms. Drawing on open-ended responses from an online survey, teachers responded to economic inequality in five general ways: a call for systemic critique, the need for empathy and inclusion, shared experiences with students and families, greater access to resources and opportunity, and a sense of hesitation and discomfort. Implications for teacher education, teacher diversity, and educational research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While in modernity childhood was increasingly invested with emotional and intellectual energy, it also became a site of scrutiny and intervention, so that philosophers, scientists, and humanitarians pursued the improvement of humanity and the human condition through management of 'the child'. In the first half of the twentieth century, such attention settled on children deemed to present both problems and opportunities for the improvement of the race, as eugenics came to dominate discussions of human progress. This article examines the significance of childhood as a resource for human futures and technologies of 'eugenics' insofar as they target children: specifically, the development of intelligence testing, institutions of separation, and involuntary sterilization in the United States and Canada. In these discourses and technologies of eugenics, childhood appears as a reserve of human potential which, appropriately regulated, may be harnessed to 'build a better future'. The article also considers the perspective of survivors of these practices who experienced their childhood and future possibilities as having been expropriated from them by the state. By considering these governmental and personal registers side by side, the article sheds light on the perceived social utility of childhood, as well as the particular character of loss experienced by those whose childhoods were subject to state intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, titled "The Foreigner," discusses the author's experience of melancholy and feeling like an outsider. The author reflects on their forced abandonment of their homeland and the perpetual sadness they feel in their new land. They express a desire to revisit their childhood memories and lament the fact that they are now unfamiliar with medical terminology. The article concludes with a disclosure statement and information about the author's affiliation. [Extracted from the article]

This paper – at the intersection of childhood studies, island studies, and geographies of place – explores place and sense of belonging in relation to the childhood memories of people from a Faroese village community in a time of societal shift. It examines and analyses the role of and dynamic connection between everyday life practices, local knowledge, and intra- and intergenerational relations in children's place-making practices and narratives. It aims to scrutinize in which sense the interplay between past and present, and between processes of continuity and discontinuity, in people's childhood narratives reflects their relations to place and ties to the past. It investigates the meaning of the coast and ocean in childhood memories, everyday life activities, and local maritime culture in a village community with strong connection to modern large-scale fisheries. It suggests that children's place-making processes and future orientations are influenced by family relations, social capital, local knowledge, and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws from theories of attachment to examine prospective teachers' reflections on the role of the parent in their childhood memories in shaping the imagination of their future selves. As part of a larger qualitative study, we collected and analyzed the memory narratives of teacher candidates and undergraduate students preparing to work with children, and selected 53 of the 116 narratives that featured parents. These memories demonstrate three ways in which parents figured into the participants'memories and reflections on their motivations to work with children: 1) as supportive role models, 2) as catalysts of sympathy for children whom teachers imagine as lacking the privileges their own parents provided, and 3) as spurs for empathy towards children whom they identify with as experiencing challenging situations. In each case, the participant created an internal working model of the child-adult relationship in their memory and imagined themselves taking up a parallel role as the adult in a future child-adult relationship. As teacher educators concerned with the identity work of preservice teachers, our findings highlight the importance of critically exploring childhood memories of parents as models for the teacher-child relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Many considerations of Walter Benjamin's oeuvre refer to the central role of the image (photographic, cinematic) and of the visual. Much has been written on terms such as the "optical unconscious," "thought image," and "dialectical image" in Benjamin, especially in his autobiographical text, Berlin Childhood Around 1900. The article seeks to draw attention to another sensory undercurrent in Berlin Childhood, namely, the sense of hearing and acoustics. Benjamin does not only think in images: he is also drawn to sounds, noises, and voices. I offer close readings of sections from Berlin Childhood (specifically, "Loggias," "Imperial Panorama," "Mummerehlen," "Market-Hall," "Blumeshof 12," and "News of Death") and show that there are two types of an acoustic presence in the text. The first pertains to the city sounds the child hears and the adult no longer pays attention to, and the second involves the sounds of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a speculative reading of crime reports from the 1960 and '70s, this article grapples with the way in which Ethiopians who refuse to be fixed within gender binaries were introduced to readers as social problems. Considering the violence gender-non-conforming people are subjected to – including by some cisgender members of the queer community itself – I closely study some of these archives to ask what could emerge if we engage them imaginatively. I experiment with the crime reports to see what a speculative reading might afford us in writing a history of the present. I subject the reports to speculation on what might have been instead of being loyal to archives and what they present to us. In an act of defying the authority of the archive, which gives a narrow and skewed account of lived experiences, I introduce a speculative biography of three gender-non-conforming Ethiopians in a fashion that moves away from the crime narrative within which they were limited. In so doing, however, I do not claim to recover their voice, their wishes and desires; I rather read a theory of how their existence was made (im)possible/freedom was practised. Though I heavily draw on the crime reports from Amharic newspapers, I juxtapose these with recently produced documentaries, my own childhood memories, ethnography as well as conversations with members of the queer community at home and in the diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western modernity has shaped people's thought patterns and value hierarchies, relegating humans to the position of supremacy. This anthropocentric worldview has disconnected humans from the rest of nature and eventually led to the social and ecological catastrophe. This paper shows that collective memory work can help us recognize how we are always socialized within and by human communities and also already ecosocialized within and by the rest of nature. The motivation to use the ecosocialization framework to analyze childhood memories comes from our wish to problematize the anthropocentric view of life further and resituate childhood and growing up beyond exclusively social and human contexts. We draw on the memories collected in the Re-Connect / Re-Collect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods project (2019–2021). We "think with theory" to reveal traces of ecosocialization present in childhood memories. On this basis, we suggest that including multisensory awareness practices in memory workshops to recognize our bodily belonging—as participants create their memory stories bringing into focus relations with more-than-humans—could potentialize collective biography as a form of transformative ecosocial education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian Sell describes a therapeutic process with a patient who struggled with feelings of hopelessness and despair. He reveals how unbearable he initially found the passivity of the patient to be and how tormented he felt by the sessions at that time. He suggests that helping the patient to find hope depended upon the therapist's resistance to the patient's despair and maintenance of a therapeutic posture intermediate between activity and passivity. It is proposed here that empathic immersion in despair, rather than resistance to it, may be an essential therapeutic factor in this circumstance. This view is consistent with Sell's experience that "letting go" of his position was paradoxically necessary in order for him to overcome his feelings of powerlessness. Hope then seemed to emerge from the deep sense of connection in a shared experience, rather than from resistance to it. This may have been what allowed the patient to reveal vivid and terrifying childhood memories, to join with the therapist in a fluid process of creative imagination, and for the shared task of reclaiming a life to begin. Relationality, rather than resistance, is sometimes what is needed in order for the light to come in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of the Babington garden as a model for accessing childhood memories that serve as a basis for engaging into the imaginative work of writing in Dorothy Richardson's novel "Pilgrimage." Topics discussed are interaction and collaboration between the protagonist Miriam's real world journey and imaginative contemplation, role of memory in the sensory perception of Miriam, and her recollection of the Babington garden as a paradox of consciousness of the past and present.

This visual essay explores the relationships between three contemporary carousels and one antique that was restored, and it examines their renaissance as key design features in the urban context of New York City. It depicts the carousels as a repository of inhabitable illusion that will continue to be shaped by the many visitors to the parks where they are located. This essay explores the spatial order that these carousels create, evoking an awareness of our own childhood experiences and the important part they played in the development of our visual arts through light, motion, and sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that MGM's 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz allegorizes both cultural and political responses to teen pregnancy in the 1930s, a decade which not only saw other movies address similar woman's rights issues, but also saw legislation which eased restrictions on abortion. Part of the film's universal appeal is its ability to represent unmarried, pregnant women from all economic brackets as well as provide a "choice" of whether to abandon or maintain what the movie directly identifies as "childhood," or one's "inner child," but which seems to represent what could more accurately be called a "child within." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Teju Cole's novels Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, 2014) and Open City (2011), big city life is explored from the perspective of narrators who are outsiders to the cities they describe. They thus give rather distanced, journalistic reports about their experiences. Both novels convey their meaning via spatio-temporal conceptions that I analyze with the help of urban theories by Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. The narrator of Open City learns to uncover spatial memory by walking the streets of New York City – spatial memory lays bare the painful source of his emotional detachment and ultimately forces him to acknowledge a crime he committed in the past. The narrator of Every Day Is for the Thief at first seems to engage in a more conventional recovery of submerged childhood memory but then also explores the specific relationship between space and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many historic city centers around the world have begun a process of regeneration in recent decades after years of stagnation and decline. Numerous factors play a role in the transformations of the historic center, including cultural tendencies, urban public policies, real estate market trends, and tourism. This study investigates the transformations of the historic neighborhoods of Kashan in Iran, during which private investors began to buy, restore, and reuse the historic houses since the 1990s. We applied a qualitative research approach, focusing on face-to-face semi-structured interviews and observations. The findings of this study revealed four groups of investors with different backgrounds and motivations: (1) rich pioneers from Tehran fascinated by architectural heritage, (2) Iranian expatriates influenced by nostalgia for authenticity, (3) European professionals interested in Iranian art and aesthetics, and (4) local investors mostly aiming to revitalize their childhood memories and introduce their cultural heritage to tourists. This study also shows that different urban transformation processes overlap and occur simultaneously in the historic neighborhoods of Kashan, generated by different investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a selective review of the literature on childhood amnesia, followed by new analyses of both published and unpublished data that has been collected in my laboratory over two decades. Analyses point to the fluidity of people's earliest memories; furthermore, methodological variation leads to individuals recalling memories from substantially earlier in their lives. How early one's "earliest" memory is depends on whether you have multiple interviews, how many early memories were requested within an interview, the type of interview, participation in prior tasks, etc. As well, people often provide chronologically earlier memories within the same interview in which they later identify a chronologically older memory as their "earliest". There may also be systematic mis-dating to older ages of very early memories. Overall, people may have a lot more memories from their preschool years than is widely believed, and be able to recall events from earlier in their lives than has been historically documented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a close analysis of interoceptive dramaturgies, and by drawing on neuroscientific and cognitive definitions of interoception, this article will explore what is at stake in employing interoceptive oriented design in performative virtual reality (VR) environments and the ethical implications of manipulating corporeal experiences through these perceptual modalities. I examine two contrasting performative VR experiences: a one-to-one interactive virtual reality performance—Goodnight, Sleep Tight (2017) by ZU-UK—and Half-Life Alyx (2020)—a VR game by Valve. The first case study is part one-to-one performance and 360-degree VR video inviting the participant to experience a dream through the eyes of a child. It is a gentle, poetic and subtly constructed VR experience that draws the participant into the world of childhood memories. The second case study is a survival horror videogame set in a three-dimensional (3D) VR environment replete with violence, gore and invasive interactivity. Despite the contrasts between the two case studies I contend, following Liam Jarvis's (2019) insight, that in both cases players/participants are construed and perform as 'surrogate selves' of their respective avatars. I also argue that their experiences are to a great extent conditioned through interoceptive aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trauma, literature, and psychoanalysis have been recent topics of inquiry from several different perspectives. However, these approaches often neglect to discuss the ways in which readers and writers are affected by engaging with these topics. By tracing the themes of loss and psychoanalysis in Georges Perec's semi-autobiography W or The Memory of Childhood (1989), this article will explore the ways in which Perec was able to change his physical and psychical wounds through writing. This text, I will suggest, not only describes, but embodies Perec's process of working through trauma, as he reconstituted himself by rewriting his past. I will argue that this was accomplished through a psychoanalytic process, and that this process is symbolised in W through a fractured story about a lost boy. This story will be read in relation to D.W. Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory of traumatic 'breakdown', which will illuminate how Perec began to repair his mind and body through W. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw from the notion of stranger-making to focus on how undergraduates of color at one large university in New York City recount their subjective experiences with inclusion and exclusion at the borderlands of educational spaces. We use narratives to evoke the unfolding of life events and to destabilize categories of difference that are all too often based on a politics of perception rather than an ethical gesture to know. This paper presents four selected vignettes that demonstrate the instability of being a racialized human and draws attention to how belonging, or socially felt memberships, is simultaneously constructed and contested in schools, and how these experiences provoke turning points in an otherwise assumed linearity from childhood to the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the concept of memory citizenship, this study examines the discursive enactment of citizenship evoked by social contention around memories of the Soviet past among the Russian-speaking minority in Estonia. It scrutinizes the rhetorical strategies and argumentative practices applied by Estonian Russian-speakers in social media discourse to defy the perceived politicization of Soviet childhood and the claim for recognition and inclusion both as mnemonic actors and political subjects. The paper demonstrates the potential of digital and performative modes of citizenship for minority publics to exercise their civic agency beyond conventional realms and forms of political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up the question of risk by examining childhood memories of nuisance-making and punishment shared by 26 participants enrolled in teacher education and/or childhood studies programs. Our analysis surfaces a tension that, on the one hand, idealizes the child as innocent instigator of playful antics and, on the other, produces a child who is guilty of punishable acts. We read these memories as an invitation to theorize a middle ground of the teacher's role as one of introducing children to a world of limits, while also limiting the force of this very effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, pedagogical reflection is examined through the lens of a practitioners' personal memories of childhood play. The telling of these stories uncovers and describes the ways in which teachers' personal play histories and their reflections upon them could inform their facilitative relationship to, provision for, and perceptions of dramatic play in their classroom. The term play history is not limited to only childhood memories, rather, it can be further clarified as memories of and experiences with play as children, young adults, and as grown practitioners. Space for both pre- and in-service teachers to explore and examine relationships and experiences with play provides a platform for acknowledgement of their pasts in relation to how they think about, allow for, and engage in play now as a professional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western knowledge and privileging scientific rationality in research. Juxtaposing the 'science' to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland', such comparative education relegated more-than-human worlds and spiritual domains of learning – and being – to our collective pasts, personal childhood memories, or imaginations. How can we reorient and attune ourselves toward a Wonder(land), rather than a Science of comparative education exclusively, opening spaces for multiple ways of making sense of the world, and multiple ways of being? How can we reanimate our capacity toengage with a more-than-human world? Based on the analysis of children's literature and textbooks published during various historical periods in Latvia, this article follows the white rabbit to reexamine taken-for-granted dichotomies – nature and culture, time and space, self and other – by bringing the 'pagan' worldviews or nature-centred spiritualities more clearly into focus, while reimagining education and childhood beyond the Western horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The VR work Turpin's Cave (2018) began as an account of the author's childhood memories of a chimeric cave in Bostall Woods, South East London. That part of London is subject to dramatic sink holes and subsidence, which in this work are a metaphor for unreliable memory, but also, as the project unfolded, became a potent symbol for the increasingly precarious nature of contemporary employment. In creating this project, the author found herself engaging with a gig economy of actors operating within a creative precariat, in which the 'choice' and 'flexibility' of deregulated work arguably creates a veneer of individual freedom. Through this project the author seeks to deconstruct some of the rhetoric of empathy, choice and immersivity that has grown around VR, evaluating whether the ontological instability of the form has non-trivial connections to the increasing precarity of global employment (Wall, Lesley, Matthew Revie, and Tim Bedford. 2018. Risk, Reliability and Safety: Innovating Theory and Practice. London: Taylor & Francis). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children seem to live more in the present moment than adults. But is it possible to make the present time perspective more available among adults? Four experiments demonstrated that activating childhood selves can lead adults to be more embedded in the hedonistic present. Studies 1 and 2 showed that recalling memories from childhood, either in an open-ended or a structured form, increased participants' focus on the hedonistic present. Study 3 showed that this effect also occurred after an implicit childhood manipulation. Study 4 revealed that taking the perspective of a child significantly increased orientation to the hedonistic present, compared to taking the perspective of an adult. The effects of activation of childhood selves were not mediated by mood, nostalgia, impatience, concentration, difficulty of the task, enjoyment connected with the task, or involvement in the task. Evaluation of one's childhood and tendency to relive childhood memories did not affect the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on teachers' written memories of Finland's comprehensive school reform in the 1970s and examines teachers' reminiscences of this major change, when elementary (primary) schools and lower secondary (grammar) schools were transformed into comprehensive schools, thereby guaranteeing nine-year basic education with a unified curriculum for all pupils. The teachers' written memories are part of the larger national collection of school memories arranged in 2013 by two academic societies. This study's focus lies in these teachers' highly sensitive, grass-roots level personal perspectives. The teachers' narratives comprised vivid and concrete memories in which they recalled the past nostalgically and in detail. In the reminiscences, the change in the education system was noted and even analysed in a versatile way, but at the same time, the reform was viewed as merely one episode occurring during these teachers' individual life paths. The writers emphasised the reform's positive aspects and did not interpret contradictions as overwhelming, although some narratives included reminiscences in which the disputes from that period were crystallised. The collective narrative in the accounts transformed from uncertainty and contradictions at the beginning of the comprehensive school reform to favourableness and positive attitudes toward the new education system after the transition period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue brings together the scholarship that contributes diverse new perspectives on childhood amnesia - the scarcity of memories for very early life events. The topics of the studies reported in the special issue range from memories of infants and young children for recent and distant life events, to mother-child conversations about memories for extended lifetime periods, and to retrospective recollections of early childhood in adolescents and adults. The methodological approaches are diverse and theoretical insights rich. The findings together show that childhood amnesia is a complex and malleable phenomenon and that the waning of childhood amnesia and the development of autobiographical memory are shaped by a variety of interactive social and cognitive factors. This collective body of work will facilitate discussion and deepen our understanding of the dynamics that influence the accessibility, content, accuracy, and phenomenological qualities of memories from early childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I provide an overview of the problems associated with understanding the nature of early autobiographical memory and discuss issues concerning the forgetting of these memories (infantile/childhood amnesia). Specifically, I provide a brief exegesis as to whether such memories are stored in a fragile manner to begin with, become difficult to retrieve over time, or both. In order to answer this and other related questions, I review the contribution of the articles in this special issue to understanding the enigma that is infantile/childhood amnesia. I then outline some of the issues that remain and suggest a functional approach to understanding why the forgetting of early experiences may be more adaptive than remembering them. I conclude by suggesting that infantile amnesia may actually begin during infancy itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This prospective longitudinal study traced changes and individual differences in childhood amnesia over adolescence. A sample of 58 adolescents were followed from age 1-1/2 to age 16 years across 8 timepoints. At ages 12 (n = 46) and 16 (n = 51), adolescents completed an early memory interview. Early childhood measures included children’s self-awareness, attachment security, nonverbal memory, verbal memory, language, theory of mind, narrative, and the early reminiscing environment (mothers’ elaborative reminiscing). Adolescents continued to forget their earliest memories over adolescence, such that the age of first memory increased from 40 to 52 months from ages 12 to 16. The sole unique contributor to individual differences in age of earliest memory at both 12 and 16 years was mothers’ elaborative reminiscing, with adolescents recalling earlier memories if their mothers had reminisced more elaboratively with them during early childhood. At age 16, the role of maternal reminiscing was moderated by self-awareness at age 1-1/2. Mothers’ elaborative reminiscing mattered for the age of adolescents’ earliest memories only for children who showed lower levels of self-awareness as toddlers. This pattern suggests a buffering effect for the role of maternal reminiscing in children’s earliest memories, and supports integrated theories of childhood amnesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-cultural differences in autobiographical memory (AM) are associated with cultural variations. In models of the self and parental reminiscing style, but not many studies have analysed the relationship between AM and specific cultural practices such as formal schooling. Theoreticians like [Greenfield, P. M. (2009). Linking social change and developmental change: Shifting. pathways of human development. Developmental Psychology, 45, 401-418. doi:10.1037/a0014726; Kağitçibaşi, C. (2005). Autonomy and relatedness in cultural context. Implications for self and family. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 36, 403-422. doi:10.1177/0022022105275959] and [Keller, H. (2007). Children development across cultures. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates] have considered formal schooling as an engine towards the model of independence; however, the empirical evidence in this regard is inconclusive: while some studies found evidence of a relation between formal schooling and characteristics of AM, others did not. To solve this inconsistency, the present study compared orally narrated childhood memories of Mexican adults with three different levels of education (from rudimentary literacy to university). Results support a relationship between formal schooling and AM in the predicted direction: More educated participants reported longer, more specific and more self-oriented memories than those with less schooling experience did. Some gender differences were also observed, with males generally reporting more individually and less socially oriented memories than females, except for university level participants. We conclude that these results support Greenfield’s theory about formal schooling as a sociocultural factor that promotes the cultural pathway to independence, as well as complexity and context-boundedness of gender differences in AM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consistency of earliest memories in content, dating, and memory qualities was investigated. A total of 84 (27 males; Mage = 24.93, SD = 1.36) adults reported earliest memories, estimated ages, and rated their recollections on memory qualities with a two-year time lag. At Time 2, their original reports at Time 1 were presented and they were asked to report whether the earliest memories they recalled at Time 2 were the same. Fifty-six per cent of the participants reported the same earliest memories and those remembering the same events had earlier memories than those remembering different ones. Although no significant differences were observed in estimated ages on the basis of mean ages, a predating bias of later memories and a tendency to postdate earlier memories were observed on the basis of a 48-month cut-off point. Thus, how the data is analysed is critical in detecting dating biases or errors affecting conclusions and interpretations about the dating consistency of earliest memories. Finally, memory qualities of earliest memories displayed a high level of consistency with a two-year time lag regardless of remembering the same versus different event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the time of Freud, psychologists have drawn conclusions about children’s memory on the basis of retrospective research with adults. Here, we turn the tables by examining what prospective studies with children and adolescents can tell us about the retrospective memory accounts provided by adults. Adults were interviewed about recent events and events from different points during their childhood (Age 5, Age 10) and early adolescence (Age 13). Children (5- and 8- to 9-year-olds) and young adolescents (12- to 13-year-olds) were interviewed about recent events. When matched for age at the time of encoding, adults recalled more about the target events than did 5-year-olds, even though the retention interval for adults was substantially longer. We conclude that retrospective studies with adults may lead researchers to overestimate the content of the early childhood memories that survive. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for an understanding of memory development and the practical implications for the interpretation of adults’ retrospective accounts in the courtroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development of autobiographical memory is as a gradual process beginning in early childhood and continuing through late adolescence. Substantial attention has been paid to early childhood when first personal memories are formed; less attention has been focused on the flourishing of memories from the late preschool years onward. We addressed this void with a three-year cohort-sequential study of age-related changes in the length, completeness, and coherence of autobiographical narratives by children 4-10 years. We also examined the unique and combined variance in autobiographical narrative explained by children’s own language, maternal narrative style, domain-general cognitive abilities, non-autobiographical story recall, and memory-specific skills. There was substantial growth in autobiographical narrative skill across the 4-10-year period. Non-autobiographical story recall was a strong concurrent and cross-lagged predictor for all autobiographical narrative measures. Memory-specific and domain-general cognitive abilities systematically predicted narrative completeness and coherence but not length. Children’s language and maternal narrative style did not contribute additional variance when these predictors were considered. The findings highlight that age-related changes in autobiographical memory are the results of combined contributions of a variety of domain-general and domain-specific predictors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work suggests that the estimated age in adults’ earliest autobiographical memories depends on age information implied by the experimental context [e.g., Kingo, O. S., Bohn, A., & Krøjgaard, P. (2013). Warm-up questions on early childhood memories affect the reported age of earliest memories in late adolescence. Memory, 21(2), 280-284. doi:10.1080/09658211.2012.729598] and that the age in decontextualised snippets of memory is younger than in more complete accounts (i.e., event memories [Bruce, D., Wilcox-O’Hearn, L. A., Robinson, J. A., Phillips-Grant, K., Francis, L., & Smith, M. C. (2005). Fragment memories mark the end of childhood amnesia. Memory & Cognition, 33(4), 567-576. doi:10.3758/BF03195324]). We examined the malleability of the estimated age in undergraduates’ earliest memories and its relation with memory quality. In Study 1 (n = 141), vignettes referring to events happening at age 2 rendered earlier reported ages than examples referring to age 6. Exploratory analyses suggested that event memories were more sensitive to the age manipulation than memories representing a single, isolated scene (i.e., snapshots). In Study 2 (n = 162), asking self-relevant and public-event knowledge questions about participants’ preschool years prior to retrieval yielded comparable average estimated ages. Both types of semantic knowledge questions rendered earlier memories than a no-age control task. Overall, the reported age in snapshots was younger than in event memories. However, age-differences between memory types across conditions were not statistically significant. Together, the results add to the growing literature indicating that the average age in earliest memories is not as fixed as previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our previous studies have consistently shown a telescoping error in children’s dating of earliest childhood memories. Preschool children through adolescents systematically date their earliest memories at older ages, in comparison with the age estimates provided by their parents or by themselves previously. In the current study, we examined the dating of earliest childhood memories in two samples of college adults and collected independent age estimates from their parents. Consistent with our findings with children, adults significantly postdated their earlier memories by approximately 12 months (Study 1) and 6 months (Study 2). The actual age of earliest memories was 2.5 years after adjusted for telescoping errors, 1 year earlier than what is commonly believed at 3.5 years. These findings challenge commonly held theoretical assumptions about childhood amnesia and highlight critical methodological issues in the study of childhood memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was an unusual scene - angry adults and young people making loud protests, accompanied and contrasted by cute yellow dolls, in defence of ‘Pikachu’ - or the ‘Pikachu’ they have long come to identify with. Nintendo’s decision to make the Mandarin transliteration of ‘Pikachu’, pikaqiu, the official Chinese name of its beloved Pokémon character has triggered this unexpected protest. On the surface it was a trivial fight over changing the translated name from the Cantonese-sounding beigaaciu to pikaqiu; to many locals, it was a battle to preserve memories and to safeguard a dwindling culture. This paper looks at the rise of China from a translation point of view, and examines how the predominantly Cantonese-speaking former British colony has struggled to come to terms with the increasing domination of the Mandarin language, whether in the realms of politics, entertainment world, everyday life, or even childhood memories. In the fight of asserting the ‘self’, translation has bcome a powerful tool to articulate the unique Cantonese identity of Hong Kong, whether in refuting the notion that the language is just a minor dialect compared to Mandarin, or in constructing and preserving the collective memory of a more glorious and recognizable past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the association of several types of childhood trauma with types of delusions and hallucinations among 42 younger adult inpatients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia at a university-affiliated hospital in South Korea. Participants were administered the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire - short form and the Scale for Assessment of Positive symptoms. Emotional abuse had a positive correlation with delusions of reference, persecutory delusions, and delusions of being controlled. There was no statistically significant relationship between childhood abuse/neglect and hallucinations. The contents of some delusions reflected adverse childhood experiences, indicating a need for further exploration of the contribution of childhood trauma to current psychotic symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with dancer and choreographer Russell Dumas is presented. He discusses projection of dance in the reorientation of postcolonial and in multiple identities and also sexuality and same-sex marriage. He also mentions the role of childhood memories in taking the decision in life and techniques in ballet dancing.