We examined how mother-child emotional reminiscing is affected by culture, gender, and the valence of the event. Thirty-one Euro-American and 30 Chinese middle-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 variety 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 negotiate

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... ion when discussing the negative event. Moreover, Chinese dyads used more negative emotion words overall than did Euro-American dyads but Euro-American dyads engaged in more negotiations of emotion than did Chinese dyads. Surprisingly, 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 particularly 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 consciousness" (Bruner, 1987) than do more mundane or neutral events.