The myth of the replacement child: parents' stories and practices after perinatal death.

Parents bereaved by perinatal death adapt to their losses in different ways. When bereaved parents give birth to a child or children subsequent to a perinatal death, their constructions of the family necessarily change. The subsequent child is thought to be at risk of psychopathology (the replacement child syndrome) if parents have not sufficiently grieved their losses. This qualitative interview study examines the family stories told by bereaved parents, with particular attention to how parents represent the dead child and subsequent children in the current family structure. We categorized parents' stories as those which suggested that parents replaced the loss by an emphasis on parenting subsequent children, or maintained a connection to the dead child through storytelling and ritual behavior. The two ways in which parents maintained the connection were to preserve the space in the family that the dead child would have inhabited, or to create an on-going relationship with the dead child for themselves and their subsequent children. There seem to be multiple paths to parenting through bereavement. The place of rituals and memorial behavior is also examined.

Orienting task effects on memory for presentation modality in children, young adults, and older adults.

Children (7 to 10 years), young adults (17 to 24 years), and older adults (55 to 77 years) were asked to learn three lists of words that were of mixed modality (half the words were visual, and half the words were auditory). With one list the subjects were asked a semantic orienting question; with another, a nonsemantic orienting question; and with a third, no orienting question. Half the subjects in each age group were also asked to remember the presentation modality of each word. Older adults remembered less information about modality than children and young adults did, and the variation in the type of orienting question--or the lack of one--affected modality identification. However, there was no Orienting Task x Age interaction for modality identification. The results of this study suggest that encoding modality information does not take place automatically--in any age group--but that explanations focusing on encoding strategies and effort are not likely to account for older adults' difficulties in remembering presentation modality.

Cognitive effort in modality retrieval by young and older adults.

A secondary task methodology was used to determine whether the retrieval of modality information is more cognitively effortful for older adults than younger ones. Young (M age = 20 years) and older (M age = 68 years) adults were asked to learn a mixed modality (auditory and visual) list of nouns. During recall of words and modality, subjects were asked to respond to a randomly presented light signal. Cognitive effort for the primary task (recall) was measured by interference with the signal detection task. Adding a modality identification task to word retrieval did not significantly increase cognitive effort for either age group, although young adults were better at both word and modality recall and word recall itself was more effortful for older adults. Results suggest that age decements in modality learning cannot be explained by greater cognitive effort during retrieval of information about modality.