‘Remember the Time’… Family Mental Health and Associations with Parent-Child Conversations

Parent-child reminiscing about emotional events is an important interaction associated with socio-cognitive and emotional outcomes (Fivush et al., 2006; Fivush et al., 2009; Wareham & Salmon, 2006). Emotion reminiscing may be a potential pathway for the transmission of mental health difficulties from parent to child (Goodman & Gotlib, 1999; Swetlitz et al., 2021). However, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding emotion reminiscing within populations of children experiencing mental health difficulties. Child mental health difficulties have been widely conceptualised as clustering into two groups: internalising (difficulties with anxiety, mood, and somatic symptoms) and externalising (difficulties with impulse control, attention, and outward behaviour) (Achenbach et al., 2016). This thesis contains four manuscripts investigating emotion reminiscing during middle childhood and the relationship with children’s internalising symptoms.