Children's Memory for a Dental Operative Procedure: The impact of Stress and Coping on Remembering (2010)

Undergraduate: Benjamin Brumley

Faculty Advisor: Peter Ornstein
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Over the course of the last 30 years, basic research on the development of memory came to be very important in legal settings in which children were asked to testify about allegations of child abuse. Since then, numerous studies have attempted to capture children’s memory for a stressful or traumatic experience (e.g., emergency room visits or urinary catherization-procedures, see e.g., Merritt, Ornstein, & Spicker, 1994; Peterson & Bell, 1996). Our current study was designed to examine children’s memory of stressful dental operative procedures. Although single value measures of stress have been extensively used in past research, our current results indicate the dentist and observer stress scores obtained by the researchers can only provide a limited way of examining stress as a factor affecting children’s memory for an event. In our study, we are exploring a novel approach of measuring stress repeatedly as the dental procedure unfolds, which we hypothesize will enable us to examine more precisely the linkage between changing levels of stress and children’s memory.