Emotion Talk in Mother-Child Conversations of the Shared Past: The Effects of Culture, Gender, and Event Valence Robyn Fivush Emory University Qi Wang Cornell university We examined how mother–child emotional reminiscing is affected by culture, gen- der, and the valence of the event. Thirty-one Euro-American and 30 Chinese mid- dle-class mothers and their 3-year-old children discussed 1 highly positive and 1 highly negative experience. Mothers and children in both cultures used a greater vari- ety of negative emotion words than positive emotion words and were more likely to confirm a shared emotional perspective when discussing the positive event but to ne- gotiate emotion when discussing the negative event. Moreover, Chinese dyads used more negative emotion words overall than did Euro-American dyads but Euro-Amer- ican dyads engaged in more negotiations of emotion than did Chinese dyads. Surpris- ingly, there were no effects of gender. Implications of these findings for emotional socialization are discussed. The ways in which we remember the emotional events of our lives may be particu- larly important for the development of self-concept. Highly emotional events tend to be more distinctive and more durable in memory (Christianson, 1992; Fivush, 1998) and therefore these events may come to form the core of an autobiographical knowledge base. Moreover, emotional events may be more informative about the self by providing more information about the “internal landscape of conscious- ness” (Bruner, 1987) than do more mundane or neutral events. Previous research JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT, 6(4), 489–506 Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Requests for reprints should be sent to Robyn Fivush, Department of Psychology, Emory Univer- sity, Atlanta, GA 30322. E-mail: psyrf@emory.edu