Suggestibility of the child witness: a historical review and synthesis

The Cutting Edge of Forensic Interviewing

This article contextualizes new knowledge about forensically interviewing and assessing children when there are concerns about child abuse. The article references the impact of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the circumstance in the 1980s where investigators and clinicians had little guidance about how to interview children about alleged sexual abuse. It further speaks to the consequences of lack of interview guidelines and how videotaped interviews in the McMartin Pre-school cases served as the catalyst for the backlash against child interviewers and their interview techniques. Painful as the backlash was, it led to research and evidence-based practice in interviewing children about child sexual and other abuse. Principal among the practice innovations were forensic interview structures to be used when there is alleged child sexual and other abuse and the strong preference for one interview by a skilled interviewer, who is nevertheless a stranger to the child. Although these innovations satisfied many professionals in the child maltreatment field and critics of child interviewers, the new practices did not address a number of abiding issues: 1) how to meet the needs of children who are unable to disclose maltreatment in a single interview, 2) how to determine which children are suggestible in a forensic interview, and 3) how decisions are made about the likelihood of abuse, based upon the child's information during the interview. The articles in this special section address these cutting-edge issues.

Age differences in false memories for visual scenes and the effect of prior recall

This study investigated age differences in false memory for visual scenes and the effect of immediate recall on subsequent recognition. Eighty children (7–9 years), 74 adolescents (14–16 years), 92 young adults (19–26 years) and 82 older adults (50–80 years) studied four visual scenes and then took a recognition test after either a free-recall task or a filler task. Results showed an age-related decline in false recognition for visual scenes, but this trend was eliminated when participants were asked to free-recall before recognition. Prior recall decreased false recognition in children, but increased false recognition in older adults. Across the lifespan, adolescents had the loosest criterion, children had the lowest false recall, and prior recall increased true recognition in older adults.

Beyond Description: The Predictive Role of Affect, Memory, and Context in the Decision to Donate or Not Donate Blood

Background

Research on the recruitment and retention of blood donors has typically drawn on a homogeneous set of descriptive theories, viewing the decision to become and remain a donor as the outcome of affectively cold, planned, and rational decision-making by the individual. While this approach provides insight into how our donors think about blood donation, it is limited and has not translated into a suite of effective interventions. In this review, we set out to explore how a broader consideration of the influences on donor decision-making, in terms of affect, memory, and the context in which donation takes place, may yield benefit in the way we approach donor recruitment and retention.

Summary

Drawing on emerging research, we argue for the importance of considering the implications of both the positive and the negative emotions that donors experience and we argue for the importance of directly targeting affect in interventions to recruit nondonors. Next, we focus on the reconstructed nature of memory and the factors that influence what we remember about an event. We discuss how these processes may impact the retention of donors and the potential to intervene to enhance donors' recollections of their experiences. Finally, we discuss how our focus on the individual has led us to neglect the influence of the context in which donation takes place on donor behavior. We argue that the amassing of comprehensive large data sets detailing both the characteristics of the individuals and the context of their giving will ultimately allow for the more effective deployment of resources to improve recruitment and retention.

Key Messages

In suggesting these directions for future research, our want is to move beyond the ways in which we have traditionally described blood donation behavior with the aim of improving our theorizing about donors while improving the translational value of our research.

Effects of Interviewer Support on Children's Memory and Suggestibility: Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses of Experimental Research

The accuracy of children's reports of abuse has been hotly debated in the press, academia, and the courtroom. Yet, children's accuracy depends, in part, on the context in which children are interviewed. Guidelines often recommend creating a supportive psychosocial context to promote open, honest responding; however, there is also concern that support promotes social desirability and acquiescence to suggestion, leading children to report more of what they perceive adults want to hear than the truth. The question remains as to whether there is a sufficient body of scientific research to determine whether interviewer supportiveness improves interview outcomes while minimizing children's stress or whether it increases suggestibility and impairs accuracy. Using a systematic search strategy and meta-analyses, this study identifies and reviews findings from experimental studies of the effects of interviewer supportiveness on the accuracy of children's reports. Although the number of studies in the evidence base is small ( n = 15), the studies are of relatively good quality. Results suggest noncontingent interviewer support bolsters children's accuracy. Children are more resistant and less acquiescent to suggestive questions when interviewers are supportive as compared to nonsupportive or neutral. Effects are in the moderate range. Interviewer support is also associated with fewer errors on nonsuggestive questions. Discussion focuses on implications for practice; directions for future research; identifying vulnerable subgroups; and underlying cognitive, social, and emotional mechanisms.

Police perceptions of the impact that ADHD has on conducting cognitive interviews with youth

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in youth witnesses, victims and suspects can significantly impact the investigative interviewing process. In this study, 102 Child Protection Investigation Unit (CPIU) detectives were asked to read four vignettes of adolescents being interviewed by police, two as witnesses and two as suspects, in which one witness and one suspect display ADHD-type behaviour. The detectives rated the degree to which the behaviour in each vignette would impact the interviewer's ability to use the 10 key components of the cognitive interview (CI). They perceived ADHD-type interviewee behaviour as significantly hampering the use of all 10 CI components. There is also a significant difference between the detectives' rated severity of each CI component; they rated Encourage Concentration, Mentally Recreate and Change Order as exerting the strongest impact on the interview process. Implications for police perceptions of training options, needs and preferences regarding interviewing youth with ADHD are discussed.

Does eyewitness and interviewer gender influence children's reports? An experimental analysis of eyewitness and interviewer gender on children's testimony

This study examines how children's age, gender and interviewer gender affected children's testimony after witnessing a theft. Children (N = 127, age = 6-11 years) witnessed an experimenter (E1) find money, which he/she may/may not have taken. E1 then asked the children to falsely deny that the theft occurred, falsely accuse E1 of taking the money, or tell the truth when interviewed by a second experimenter. Falsely denying or falsely accusing influenced children's forthcomingness and quality of their testimony. When accusing, boys were significantly more willing than girls to disclose about the theft earlier and without being asked directly. When truthfully accusing, children gave lengthier testimony to same-gendered adults. When denying, children were significantly more willing to disclose the theft earlier to male interviewers than to females. As children aged, they were significantly less likely to lie, more likely to disclose earlier when accusing, and give lengthier and more consistent testimony.

Here is a hint! How children integrate reliable recommendations in their memory decisions

Children's own memory is not the only reliable source of information about past events. Others may possess relevant knowledge, and children must learn to appropriately consider it in combination with their own memories. In the current study, we investigated 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) ability to incorporate probabilistically reliable (70% accurate) hints into their memory decisions. Results revealed that children across ages were appropriately sensitive to these cues without following them blindly and indiscriminately. Furthermore, individual differences in metamemory monitoring predicted overall accuracy improvements after receiving cues in 9-year-olds but not in 5- and 7-year-olds, revealing a developmental role of metamemory for discerning when cues are most informative or needed. Although 5-year-olds increased overall confidence in their memory after receiving invalid cues, they still preserved the capacity to monitor their memory in the face of inaccurate information. Overall, children were sensitive to reliable recommendations, but developing metacognitive mechanisms predicted judicious benefits from cues.

Rethinking the Reliability of Eyewitness Memory

Although certain pockets within the broad field of academic psychology have come to appreciate that eyewitness memory is more reliable than was once believed, the prevailing view, by far, is that eyewitness memory is unreliable—a blanket assessment that increasingly pervades the legal system. On the surface, this verdict seems unavoidable: Research convincingly shows that memory is malleable, and eyewitness misidentifications are known to have played a role in most of the DNA exonerations of the innocent. However, we argue here that, like DNA evidence and other kinds of scientifically validated forensic evidence, eyewitness memory is reliable if it is not contaminated and if proper testing procedures are used. This conclusion applies to eyewitness memory broadly conceived, whether the test involves recognition (from a police lineup) or recall (during a police interview). From this perspective, eyewitness memory has been wrongfully convicted of mistakes that are better construed as having been committed by other actors in the legal system, not by the eyewitnesses themselves. Eyewitnesses typically provide reliable evidence on an initial, uncontaminated memory test, and this is true even for most of the wrongful convictions that were later reversed by DNA evidence.

Suggestibility in neglected children: The influence of intelligence, language, and social skills

We administered the GSS-2, a standardised measure of suggestibility, to 5- to 12-year-old children to ascertain whether neglected children's responses to leading questions distinguish them from those of their non-neglected counterparts. Neglected children (n = 75) were more likely than an age-matched sample of non-neglected children (n = 75) to yield to leading questions, despite no difference in their ability to recall the test stimuli. Subsequent collection of individual difference data from the neglected sample revealed that this effect could not be attributed to intelligence, language ability, problem behaviours, age at onset of neglect, or time spent in out-of-home care. With respect to social skill, however, suggestibility was positively correlated with communicative skill, and marginally positively correlated with assertion and engagement. While on the surface our social skills findings seem counter-intuitive, it is possible that maltreated children with relative strengths in these areas have learned to comply with adults in their environment as a way to protect themselves or even foster belonging. Our data, while preliminary, raise interesting questions about whether targeted interventions could help these children to more actively participate in decisions about their lives.

Does parental coaching affect children's false reports? Comparing verbal markers of deception

The present study examined differences in children's true and false narratives as a function of parental coaching by comparing the verbal markers associated with deception. Children (N = 65, 4-7 years old) played the same game with an adult stranger over three consecutive days. Parents coached their children to falsely allege that they had played a second game and to generate details for the fabricated event. One week after the last play session, children were interviewed about their experiences. For children with the least amount of parental coaching, true and false reports could be distinguished by multiple verbal markers of deception (e.g., cognitive processes, temporal information, self-references). The fabricated reports of children who spent more time being coaching by a parent resembled their truthful reports. These findings have implications for real-world forensic contexts when children have been coached to make false allegations and fabricate information at the behest of a parent.

The credibility of testimony from minors allegedly victims of abuse within the Italian legislative framework

The authors aim to analyze the key aspects related to the testimony of children who might have been victims of sexual harassment and abuse. The issue of medico-legal psychiatric assessment of minors who claim to have been sexually abused is extremely contentious and widely-debated, not only due to the growing spread of such claims, but also on account of the technical challenges it raises. For these reasons, national as well as European lawmakers have intervened by enacting new legislation, and scientific communities have established new sets of guidelines aimed at improving the overall conditions under which a child is called to testify as well as the process through which depositions are collected and evaluated, so as to ensure that any assessment of the reliability of the testimony is scientifically grounded. The authors also highlight the importance of regulatory measures meant to minimize the risk that the questioning of a child might negatively affect his or her emotional balance by limiting and lessening stressful conditions and anxiety, which may traumatize and irretrievably scar the child. Moreover, they stress the importance of dealing with the social issue of child abuse by strengthening a preventive set of measures.

How children remember the Strange Situation: The role of attachment

This study tested predictions from Bowlby's attachment theory about children's memory and suggestibility. Young children (3-5years old, N=88; 76% Caucasians) and their parents took part in the Strange Situation Procedure, a moderately distressing event and "gold standard" for assessing children's attachment quality. The children were then interviewed about what occurred during the event. Children's age and attachment security scores positively predicted correct information in free recall and accuracy in answering specific questions. For children with higher (vs. lower) attachment security scores, greater distress observed during the Strange Situation Procedure predicted increased resistance to misleading suggestions. In addition, for children who displayed relatively low distress during the Strange Situation Procedure, significant age differences in memory and suggestibility emerged as expected. However, for children who displayed greater distress during the Strange Situation Procedure, younger and older children's memory performances were equivalent. Findings suggest that attachment theory provides an important framework for understanding facets of memory development with respect to attachment-related information and that distress may alter assumed age patterns in memory development.

The effect of unsuccessful retrieval on children's subsequent learning

It is well known that successful retrieval enhances subsequent adults' learning by promoting long-term retention. Recent research has also found benefits from unsuccessful retrieval, but the evidence is not as clear-cut when the participants are children. In this study, we employed a methodology based on guessing-the weak associate paradigm-to test whether children can learn from generated errors or whether errors are harmful for learning. We tested second- and third-grade children in Experiment 1 and tested preschool and kindergarten children in Experiment 2. With slight differences in the method, in both experiments children heard the experimenter saying one word (cue) and were asked to guess an associate word (guess condition) or to listen to the correspondent target-associated word (study condition), followed by corrective feedback in both conditions. At the end of the guessing phase, the children undertook a cued-recall task in which they were presented with each cue and were asked to say the corrected target. Together, the results showed that older children-those in kindergarten and early elementary school-benefited from unsuccessful retrieval. Older children showed more correct responses and fewer errors in the guess condition. In contrast, preschoolers produced similar levels of correct and error responses in the two conditions. In conclusion, generating errors seems to be beneficial for future learning of children older than 5years.

The Development of Conformity Among Chinese Children Aged 9-15 Years in a Public Choice Task

Both children and adults exhibit moderate conformity behaviors when facing group pressure. While some studies purport that children conform more with age, others have shown the opposite. The publicity of decision-making might be a major factor influencing the development of children's conformity behavior. In this study, we recruited 295 Chinese children aged 9-15 years. We observed no significant correlation between children's age and conformity behaviors when their answers were kept confidential. However, older children showed stronger conformity behaviors when their answers were made public. According to cultural evolutionary theory, with age, children find group acceptance and social recognition increasingly more important, which explains why older children are more likely to conform-namely, doing so has adaptive value. Further research should explore the cross-cultural coherence of this phenomenon and the genuine motivation behind children's conformity behaviors. Meanwhile, designing a more reliable and valid experiment would also be a fruitful direction.

A historical comparison of Australian lawyers' strategies for cross-examining child sexual abuse complainants

Many child sexual abuse complainants find the adversarial trial process so distressing that they say they would never report abuse again. Their concerns stem largely from cross-examination, in which the lawyer acting for the accused attempts to discredit their evidence. We examined whether-and if so, how-Australian defense lawyers' approaches to cross-examining child sexual abuse complainants have changed meaningfully over the past 60 years. To do this, we systematically evaluated cases that were prosecuted in the 1950s, comparing them to a matched set of cases from the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite the intervening law reforms designed to improve complainants' experience in court, we found that, relative to their historical counterparts, contemporary child complainants of sexual abuse are actually subjected to far lengthier cross-examinations involving a much broader range of strategies and associated tactics. These findings have important implications for future legal practice and reform, and for the way in which these are evaluated.

Surveillance or Engagement: Children's Conflicts During Health Maintenance Visits

OBJECTIVE

School-aged health maintenance visits seek to prevent or intervene early with health issues of lifelong importance. Little is known about what children expect to happen in these visits or how they experience them, factors related to their engagement as active collaborators in care.

METHODS

Thirty children (53% Latino, 27% African-American, and 20% white) ages 7 to 11 years were video recorded during a health maintenance visit and then interviewed while reviewing the videos. Interview transcripts were analyzed for understanding the purpose of the visit, feelings of comfort and discomfort, and decisions about how much to participate.

RESULTS

Children expected doctors to be helpful, caring, and a source of important information. They anticipated visits to include immunizations, a physical examination, and praise for accomplishments, but could be surprised by questions about behavior, family function, and lifestyle. During visits, feelings varied from warmth toward providers to embarrassment, wariness, irritation, and boredom. Even when bored or irritated, children hesitated to interrupt parent-provider conversations or correct perceived provider misunderstandings, not wanting to be seen as inappropriate or rude. When asked questions they considered off topic, likely to reveal sensitive information, or that could lead to changes in their lifestyle, some were silent or answered evasively. Some said they would have spoken more freely without their parent present but valued parental support and wanted parents to make important decisions.

CONCLUSIONS

School-aged children's limited knowledge of what to expect in health maintenance visits, uncertainty about conversational norms with adults, and desire to assert control over their lives compete with their desire to access expert advice and form bonds with providers. Engaging children in health maintenance visits might require more relationship-building and education about the visit's goals.

Children's use of sexual body part terms in witness interviews about sexual abuse

For successful prosecution, investigative interviews with child sexual abuse victims need to establish the nature of the alleged offence by determining the body parts that were involved. To date, however, there has been a paucity of research on the extent to which children clearly identify sexual body parts in interviews and how they respond to interviewers' attempts to clarify ambiguous terms. The present study sought to explore children's use of sexual body part terms in field interviews, and their responses to questions aimed at clarifying ambiguous terms. Analyses were conducted on 161 transcripts of field interviews with children aged 4-17 years old, coding for the content of interviewers' questions and of children's responses. Results revealed that many children, even some in their late teens, struggled to provide clear terms for their sexual body parts, either initially, or when asked to provide an alternate term. Questions about body part location or function tended to elicit content appropriate responses in children, irrespective of age. The study discusses the capacity (or willingness) of children to provide clear body part terms in witness interviews and the utility of particular questions. The findings imply a need for caution when following up on the meaning of terms or asking particular clarifying questions, and highlight the importance of childhood education around body parts.

The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Turning a Blind Eye to the Evidence in the So-Called Name of Justice

For more than two decades, conventional wisdom about the high-profile day care cases of the 1980s and early 1990s suggests all were modern-day witch hunts, based on false allegations made by highly suggestible children during an era when society was gripped by a "believe the children" hysteria. Author Ross Cheit refutes conventional wisdom by conducting an exhaustive examination of original data from dozens of cases bearing the witch hunt label. He concludes there was no witch-hunt epidemic, finding substantial evidence of sexual abuse in nearly every case he reviewed, contradicting the assertions made about those cases by what he calls the witch-hunt narrative. Cheit examines the legacy of the witch-hunt narrative and contends its exaggerated claims about the suggestibility of children have had a negative effect on the credibility of children today who allege being sexually abused. This writer examines Cheit's conclusions in light of her own experience as a career prosecutor of crimes against children as well as her involvement in a high-profile day care case encompassed by the witch-hunt narrative. Setting the record straight about these cases is important not only for the sake of historical accuracy and intellectual honesty but also because the witch-hunt narrative's unwarranted assertions about the suggestibility of children have had a negative effect on society's perception of their credibility. Bringing public attention to the fallacies of the witch-hunt narrative and shining a light on questionable tactics used by some in academia to support their contention that all children are highly suggestible will ultimately serve to strengthen society's ability to believe a child who discloses sexual abuse.

Is There Consensus About Children's Memory and Suggestibility?

The modern scientific study of children's eyewitness memory was initially motivated, in important part, by the sensational preschool investigations and prosecutions of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., the McMartin case, the Kelly Michaels case, the Country Walk case). These cases form the centerpiece of Professor Cheit's scholarly book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative. In recent years, researchers have made great strides in helping the legal system tackle some of the complex issues involved in child sexual abuse investigations. While commenting on Professor Cheit's book, we review areas of consensus regarding child forensic interviewing, areas of disconnect between scientific laboratory studies and needs of the legal system, and the potential effects of bias on the scientific enterprise relevant to Professor Cheit's treatise. Although we find that there is consensus in the field regarding a set of general principles, there is often room for disagreement in evaluating a particular case, and there is still much to be learned about how best to interview children when allegations of sexual abuse arise.

A Narrative on The Witch-Hunt Narrative: The Moral Dimensions

Ross Cheit's The Witch-Hunt Narrative raises a number of complex moral issues. Cheit's principal purpose is to challenge the belief that our society has overreacted to claims about the sexual abuse of children. Both directly and indirectly, Cheit's in-depth analysis broaches moral concerns pertaining to the integrity of child abuse allegations, investigations, civil litigation, and criminal prosecution, with an emphasis on the mixed motives of the parties involved in key cases. This article provides an overview of ethical questions pertaining to gathering information from very vulnerable individuals, informed consent, institutional review, protection of research participants, the use of deception and coercion, confidentiality and privacy, reporting research results, and conflicts of interest. In addition, the author discusses the phenomenon of whistle-blowing as it pertains to professionals' ethical judgments about disclosure of wrongdoing and misconduct. The author outlines key ethics-related concepts, applies relevant moral theory, and explores the implications of the moral issues raised by The Witch-Hunt Narrative for child sexual abuse victims, perpetrators, child welfare and law enforcement professionals, scholars and researchers, and the public at large.

The Child Witness in the Courtroom

Beginning in the 1980s, children have increasingly served as witnesses in the criminal, civil, and family courts; currently, >100 000 children appear in court each year. This statement updates the 1992 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) policy statement "The Child as a Witness" and the subsequent 1999 "The Child in Court: A Subject Review." It also builds on existing AAP policy on adverse life events affecting children and resources developed to understand and address childhood trauma. The purpose of this policy statement is to provide background information on some of the legal issues involving children testifying in court, including the accuracy and psychological impact of child testimony; to provide suggestions for how pediatricians can support patients who will testify in court; and to make recommendations for policy improvements to minimize the adverse psychological consequences for child witnesses. These recommendations are, for the most part, based on studies on the psychological and physiologic consequences of children witnessing and experiencing violence, as well as appearing in court, that have emerged since the previous AAP publications on the subject. The goal is to reduce the secondary traumatization of and long-term consequences for children providing testimony about violence they have experienced or witnessed. This statement primarily addresses children appearing in court as victims of physical or sexual abuse or as witnesses of violent acts; most of the scientific literature addresses these specific situations. It may apply, in certain situations, to children required to provide testimony in custody disputes, child welfare proceedings, or immigration court. It does not address children appearing in court as offenders or as part of juvenile justice proceedings.

The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Introduction and Overview

This article provides an overview of The Witch-Hunt Narrative, focusing on the challenges of gathering information from young children, such as those involved in sexual abuse allegations in day care. The article summarizes the research methodology of The Witch-Hunt Narrative, which involves a series of case studies. The article articulates Cheit's hypothesis, which is that the witch-hunt narrative originated in two key publications, a series of articles by two journalists, Tom Charlier and Shirley Dowling, and the book, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern-Day Witch-Hunt, by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, and notes his disputes with the evidence from these two publications. Cheit deals in depth with three hotly contested day care center cases: the McMartin Pre-School case in Manhattan Beach, California, the Wee Care Day Nursery case in Maplewood, New Jersey, and the Country Walk Babysitting Service case in Dade County, Florida. The article summarizes Cheit's research and conclusions related to these three cases and also notes how forensic interview practices used in these cases would not be supported today. The article concludes with noting that despite the impressive progress in forensic interviewing of children when sexual abuse is alleged, methods for gathering information from young children remain inadequate. Moreover, there are no easy answers to the reasons for the rise and fall of allegations of sexual abuse in day care and of allegations of ritual abuse.

Maltreatment increases spontaneous false memories but decreases suggestion-induced false memories in children

We examined the creation of spontaneous and suggestion‐induced false memories in maltreated and non‐maltreated children. Maltreated and non‐maltreated children were involved in a Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory paradigm where they studied and remembered negative and neutral word lists. Suggestion‐induced false memories were created using a misinformation procedure during which both maltreated and non‐maltreated children viewed a negative video (i.e., bank robbery) and later received suggestive misinformation concerning the event. Our results showed that maltreated children had higher levels of spontaneous negative false memories but lower levels of suggestion‐induced false memories as compared to non‐maltreated children. Collectively, our study demonstrates that maltreatment both increases and decreases susceptibility to memory illusions depending on the type of false memory being induced.

A Case Concerning Children's False Memories of Abuse: Recommendations Regarding Expert Witness Work

Expert witnesses can play a major role in legal cases concerning the reliability of statements. Abuse cases frequently contain only the memories of eyewitnesses/victims without the presence of physical evidence. Here, it is of the utmost importance that expert witnesses use scientific evidence for their expert opinion. In this case report, a case is described in which 20 children reported being sexually abused by the same teachers at their elementary school. The investigative steps that were taken by the police and school authorities are reviewed, including how they probably affected memory. In order to provide a sound expert opinion regarding the reliability of these statements, three recommendations are proposed. To reduce the effect of confirmation bias and increase objectivity, it is argued that expert witnesses' reports should contain alternative scenarios, be checked by another expert, and focus on the origin and context of the first statement.

Adversarial allegiance: The devil is in the evidence details, not just on the witness stand

This study examined the potential influence of adversarial allegiance on expert testimony in a simulated child sexual abuse case. A national sample of 100 witness suggestibility experts reviewed a police interview of an alleged 5-year-old female victim. Retaining party (prosecution, defense) and interview suggestibility (low, high) varied across experts. Experts were very willing to testify, but more so for the prosecution than the defense when interview suggestibility was low and vice versa when interview suggestibility was high. Experts' anticipated testimony focused more on prodefense aspects of the police interview and child's memory overall (negativity bias), but favored retaining party only when interview suggestibility was low. Prosecution-retained experts shifted their focus from prodefense aspects of the case in the high suggestibility interview to proprosecution aspects in the low suggestibility interview; defense experts did not. Blind raters' perceptions of expert focus mirrored those findings. Despite an initial bias toward retaining party, experts' evaluations of child victim accuracy and police interview quality were lower in the high versus low interview suggestibility condition only. Our data suggest that adversarial allegiance exists, that it can (but not always) influence how experts process evidence, and that it may be more likely in cases involving evidence that is not blatantly flawed. Defense experts may evaluate this type of evidence more negatively than prosecution experts because of negativity bias and positive testing strategies associated with confirmation bias. (PsycINFO Database Record

Perceptions of a Child as Witness: Effects of Leading Questions and the Type of Relationship between Child and Defendant

The effects of type of questioning (leading or nonleading) and type of relationship between child and defendant (defendant is known, i.e., relative, or unknown, i.e., stranger) on mock jurors' perceptions of a child witness were investigated. 92 students read a transcript (a prosecutor questioning a child witness), then answered questions (each on an 11-point scale) regarding their perceptions of the child witness. When the questioning was nonleading (vs leading), the mock jurors judged the certainty of their verdict to be greater ( M = 8.1, SD = 1.9 M = 7.1, SD = 25, respectively) and the child witness to be more credible ( M = 9.0, SD = 1.7; M = 7.9, SD = 2.6, respectively) and honest ( M = 9.8, SD = 1.2; M = 8.7, SD = 2.4, respectively). The type of relationship between the defendant and the child witness did not affect perceptions of the child witness. Possible reasons and implications for the findings are discussed.

Conversation analysis in the differentiation of psychogenic nonepileptic and epileptic seizures in pediatric and adolescent settings

The differential diagnosis of epileptic seizures (ES) and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) is often difficult, especially in pediatric and adolescent settings. Conversation analysis (CA) can be a worthwhile diagnostic tool in adults. The aim of this study was to assess the diagnostic value of CA in Italian children and adolescents. Ten patients (seven females and three males), diagnosed using video-EEG as having either ES or PNES, underwent a video-recorded interview by a physician from outside the center specifically trained for this purpose. An external linguistic rater then examined the video recordings and transcripts using CA. Diagnoses formulated on the basis of interactional and linguistic features of the patients' speech were compared with diagnoses made by seizure experts on the basis of all available clinical information including the video-EEG findings. Conversation analysis diagnoses corresponded to the video-EEG diagnoses in 8 out of 10 cases. In conclusion, while some conversational adaptation is necessary to enable children and adolescents to share their seizure experiences with an adult health professional, this study indicates the differential diagnostic potential of a CA approach in these young people with PNES or epilepsy. Larger samples are obviously needed to confirm these findings.

Telling Stories

This paper analyses the rhetorical structure of psychological experiments investigating children's suggestibility, the wider context of debates that these inform, and the cultural-political status of psychological expertise that such claims bolster. It draws on the debates around childhood accounting to reverse the specular apparatus of the psychological gaze and so to inspect its practitioners according to those discourses and rhetorical devices by which it accounts for children. The stories psychologists tell about children are analysed as not only indicative of the contemporary legitimizing practices of the discipline, but also as suggesting a motivated forgetting or recasting of psychology's past approaches to the topics of children's beliefs, knowledge and memories. Thus, by turning the focus from the stories (we make) children tell, to our own storytelling practices as psychologists, this paper engages in a practice of critical relativism that opens the terms of developmental psychological inquiry up for critical scrutiny, and thereby both limits and secures the grounds for its claims.

Disclosure as Discourse

Conventional frameworks conceptualizing children's disclosures of sexual abuse are helpful in drawing links between the dynamics of abuse and its subsequent reporting (e.g. Summit, 1983) and in articulating developmental impediments to disclosure (e.g. Bussey & Grimbeek, 1995). But these models underemphasize the discursive (and, hence, social) basis of children's reports in that patterns of disclosure are depicted as individualistic phenomena. This article proposes a discursive reformulation of children's reports of sexual abuse. The concept of co-construction is applied to the research traditions of conversation analysis (e.g. Nofsinger, 1991), the discourse action model (Edwards & Potter, 1992), narrative analysis (e.g. Bruner, 1991), positioning theory (e.g. Harré & van Langenhove, 1992) and cultural discourses (e.g. Burman, 1995) to theorize children's reports of sexual abuse as socially situated collaborations. The implications of a discursive approach for concerns of power and social justice are discussed.

The malleability of developmental trends in neutral and negative memory illusions

Among many legal professionals and memory researchers there exists the assumption that susceptibility to false memory decreases with age. In 4 misinformation experiments, we show that under conditions that focus on the meaning of experiences, children are not always the most susceptible to suggestion-induced false memories. We begin by presenting a short overview of previous developmental false memory studies, the majority of which have found that the susceptibility to misinformation decreases with age. In Experiment 1, 6/7-year-olds, 11/12-year-olds, and adults received a video and were confronted with misinformation about related but nonpresented details. Older children and adults had higher misinformation acceptance rates than younger children. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding adding a younger child group (4/6-year-olds). In Experiments 3 and 4, we used new material and again found that susceptibility to misinformation increased with age. Together, these experiments show that children's memory accuracy is not necessarily inferior to that of adults.'

Interviewing Child Witnesses: Past and Future

Much of the improvement in child witness interviewing in England and Wales has been based on the findings of psychological research concerning memory and language. However, relatively little research has been conducted on the possible influence of interviewer style or manner. This article reviews the limited previous research on this topic and presents a new study. It seems that an authoritative interviewing style may increase children's errors to suggestive questions.

Narrative, Time and the Emergence of the Encultured Self

It is argued here that ‘the encultured self’ emerges in early to later childhood from the earlier experiential self that is differentiated from other persons and other objects in infancy and early childhood. The later sense of self is derived largely from verbal exchanges with significant others, both narrative and explanatory, about shared and unshared experiences, and about the stories, histories and myths of the embedding culture. These enable the child to achieve a continuing sense of self in time with relations to other times and places beyond personal experience.