An interview with Robyn Fivush, professor of psychology

Academic Exchange: Talk about your work on gender differences in autobiographic memory.

Professor Robyn Fivush: As adults, women have more detailed and autobiographic memories and talk more about their emotional experiences than men do. We're seeing that this emerges very early. Even in the preschool years, girls are already talking more about their emotional experiences than boys are. And parents talk to daughters differently than they do with sons. They talk more about past incidents with daughters, and they talk in more elaborated and detailed ways overall. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference in the way parents talk about happy emotions with boys and girls; however, they talk more about emotion associated with past events with daughters. Sadness is talked about three times as much with girls as with boys, and that starts as early as age two

AE: Why?

RF: There's a large literature that indicates both mothers and fathers show more communication with girls. It starts in infancy, perhaps triggered by minor physiological differences between girls and boys. Females are born a shade more mature than boys, can maintain an alert, steady state longer than boys, and are not as irritable and fussy. These are very small gender differences. But they lead to a pattern of interaction with daughters that generates more communication-facial and emotional communication-----even before they're talking. I think there's both biologically based reasons and culturally based reasons that lead parents to talk more to girls than boys. They talk more overall, so they talk more about past events. Stereotypes about gender and emotionality also lead parents to talk to girls about emotion. But, frankly, I think there is something coming from the girls themselves. Children are active participants in their socialization. If they don't want to sit still and listen, they won't.

AE: Do you think this may relate to what one psychologist has called women's tendency toward "ruminative coping" and higher incidence of depression?

RF: Susan Nolan in California proposed that theory, and there's some evidence for it. Anything done to extremes can be unhealthy. People definitely need to talk about their emotions, but if you do nothing but reflect and talk, then you can just stew in it, and that's not good.

It's not that parents are doing the right thing with boys and the wrong thing with girls--or vice versa--and we need to change it. There needs to be a happy medium.

AE: There's a lot of work going on here at Emory about children and mental health. Can you point to something about our time and place that makes this especially important, or has something happened in the larger culture that makes us able to appreciate this now?

RF: Rates of child abuse, most historians would agree, have probably not increased over the last couple of hundred years. But child abuse was not identified as a social problem until the mid 1960s. Doctors had said it can't be the case that parents would break their children's bones. I think it's so aversive to most people that we simply swept it under the rug to a large extent. But, why is it coming up now? Partly because the second wave of the women's movement brought attention to issues of violence against women and children and issues of sexual abuse. We could talk about sex with the "sexual revolution." Prior to that, many women felt they just could not say anything about their abuse. So I think their were economic and political reasons why in the '70s society opened up and we were allowed to talk about some of these issues. And that then opened up a field of research.

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