September 19, 2014

When I Was 5, I, Um — What Were We Just Talking About?


I remember approximately diddly-squat1 about my childhood. But why? Melissa Dahl explains the latest research to me today:

The way parents tend to talk to their sons is different from the way they talk to their daughters. Mothers tend to introduce more snippets of new information in conversations with their young daughters than they do with their young sons, research has shown. And moms tend to ask more questions about girls’ emotions; with boys, on the other hand, they spend more time talking about what they should do with those feelings.

This is at least partially a product of parents acting on gender expectations they may not even realize they have, and the results are potentially long-lasting, explained Azriel Grysman, a psychologist at Hamilton College who studies gender differences and memory. “The message that girls are getting is that talking about your feelings is part of describing an event,” Grysman said….“And it’s quite possible, over time, that those tendencies will help women establish more connections in their brains of different pieces of an event, which will lead to better memory long-term.”

So I can blame my crappy memory on my mother? Cool.

1This is a technical term used by neurologists and memory researchers.

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