UC Davis

People interact with each other on a daily basis. How children and adults remember and forecast aspects of their social encounters depend on the interpersonal contexts of these events. My dissertation focuses on two aspects of human cognition: (a) memory, an important gateway through which truth about the past may be assessed, and (b) future-oriented thinking, which sheds light on factors that motivate decisions about prosocial and antisocial behaviors. Across three studies, I examined how prior, current, and anticipated social relationships contribute to children’s and adults’ reports of interpersonal experiences. In Chapter 1, I tested 5- to 10-year-old children’s memory for a scripted interaction with their father. Results revealed that the quantity and quality of the parent-child relationship (e.g., familiarity with the father, frequency of harsh parenting) played an important role in children’s memory accuracy, including for parts of the interaction that pertain to potential acts of abuse in forensic and legal settings. In Chapter 2, I investigated predictors of adults’ long-term memory for childhood physical contact in a longitudinal maltreatment sample. Characteristics of the alleged childhood sexual abuse (e.g., abuse severity, victim-perpetrator relationship) predicted memory for an abuse-focused anogenital inspection that checked for signs of sexual trauma 20 years prior. In Chapter 3, I studied young adults’ emotion judgments following hypothetical prosocial and antisocial behaviors. Relational contexts of the events and participants’ cultural orientation influenced their emotion attributions, which can be important for motivating legal decisions made by juries and law professionals. Findings from my dissertation highlight a need to situate memory and emotion cognition within social contexts. Relationships and interpersonal involvement not only shape how interactions are processed and reported, but they also help determine which aspects of an event are more personally relevant and memorable over time.