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ABSTRACT There has been little empirical research on adults' memories of important events from childhood. In the present paper, 50 college students were asked to summarize one of their earliest memories that had a strong emotional impact. The memories they reported were found to include a rich variety of themes. Interestingly, almost all of the memories reported were unhappy ones. Moreover, there were significant sex differences, both in the types of theme included and in the estimated ages at which the recalled events had occurred. The results suggest that negative affect may organize and preserve memory for certain aspects of childhood events.
Cowan et al. (Sat,) studied this question.