The possible role of source misattributions in the creation of false beliefs among preschoolers

Posttraumatische Belastungsstörung bei Kindern und Jugendlichen

Zusammenfassung. Theoretischer Hintergrund: Bislang liegen im Vergleich zur Forschung zur Posttraumatischen Belastungsstörung (PTB) bei Erwachsenen erst wenige Studien zur Epidemiologie und zur Behandlung der Störung bei Kindern und Jugendlichen vor. Ätiologische Modelle berücksichtigen bislang nur wenig entwicklungsbedingte Besonderheiten der Traumatisierung im frühen Lebensalter. Fragestellung: Überblick zum Stand der Forschung zu Häufigkeit, Entstehung, Aufrechterhaltung und Behandlung der PTB im Kindes- und Jugendalter. Methode: Analyse bislang vorliegender empirischer und theoretischer Arbeiten. Ergebnisse: Das Symptombild bei Kindern unterscheidet sich deutlich von dem der Erwachsenen, Unterschiede sowie diagnostische Instrumente werden beschrieben. Nach dem Erleben von Gewalt, besonders sexueller Art, erkranken Kinder und Jugendliche im Vergleich zu anderen Formen der Traumatisierung am häufigsten an einer PTB. Jungen sind insgesamt nach einer Traumatisierung weniger stark von posttraumatischer Symptomatik betroffen als Mädchen. Das Risiko, an PTB zu erkranken, steigt mit sinkendem Lebensalter bei Traumatisierung. Behandlungsprogramme beziehen diese besondere Vulnerabilität bislang nur wenig ein. Kontrollierte und randomisierte Studien zur Überprüfung ihrer Wirksamkeit fehlen. Schlussfolgerung: Kognitive Modelle, welche Besonderheiten der Wahrnehmung, Verarbeitung und Speicherung traumatischer Informationen in den Mittelpunkt stellen, liefern - durch die Berücksichtigung der Entwicklung kognitiver Fähigkeiten - Erklärungsmöglichkeiten für die negative Assoziation zwischen Lebensalter bei Traumatisierung und Vulnerabilität für PTB und Behandlungsansätze für die PTB im Kindes- und Jugendalter.

Describing individual incidents of sexual abuse: a review of research on the effects of multiple sources of information on children's reports

OBJECTIVE

For successful prosecution of child sexual abuse, children are often required to provide reports about individual, alleged incidents. Although verbally or mentally rehearsing memory of an incident can strengthen memories, children's report of individual incidents can also be contaminated when they experience other events related to the individual incidents (e.g., informal interviews, dreams of the incident) and/or when they have similar, repeated experiences of an incident, as in cases of multiple abuse.

METHOD

Research is reviewed on the positive and negative effects of these related experiences on the length, accuracy, and structure of children's reports of a particular incident.

RESULTS

Children's memories of a particular incident can be strengthened when exposed to information that does not contradict what they have experienced, thus promoting accurate recall and resistance to false, suggestive influences. When the encountered information differs from children's experiences of the target incident, however, children can become confused between their experiences-they may remember the content but not the source of their experiences.

CONCLUSIONS

We discuss the implications of this research for interviewing children in sexual abuse investigations and provide a set of research-based recommendations for investigative interviewers.

A case study of child sexual false allegation

PURPOSE

The objectives of the case study reported in this article were twofold. The first objective was to follow the path by which a naive suggestion made in the course of a mother-child conversation was transformed into an allegation of severe sexual abuse. The second objective was to analyze the child's interview scientifically and explore the limitations of scientific tools for detecting implausible allegations.

METHODS

Independent case facts were collected and analyzed to determine whether the event described by the child was likely to have happened. The credibility of the child's account was assessed using Criterion-Based Content Analysis and the information provided in both the "implausible" and "corrected" statements was compared to quantify the fabricated details in the implausible statement.

RESULTS

The event described by the child was "very unlikely to have happened" but the credibility assessment failed to detect its implausibility. Comparison of the two statements revealed that the child did fabricate central details but incorporated them into a description of an event she really experienced, and most of the information provided was truthful.

CONCLUSIONS

The pressure to conform to suggestions can be irresistible, inducing some children to make false allegations of severe sexual abuse. Scientific tools designed for credibility assessment are limited and may fail to detect implausible statements especially when they incorporate information about genuinely experienced events.

Source monitoring and false memories in children: relation to certainty and executive functioning

We presented children aged 6, 8, and 10 years with a video and then an audio tape about a dog named Mick. Some information was repeated in the two sources and some was unique to one source. We examined: (a) children's hit rate for remembering whether events occurred and their tendency to make false alarms, (b) their memory for the context in which events occurred (source monitoring), (c) their certainty about hits, false alarms, and source, and (d) whether working memory and inhibition were related to hits, false alarms, and source monitoring. The certainty ratings revealed deficits in children's understanding of when they had erred on source questions and of when they had made false alarms. In addition, inhibitory ability accounted for unique variance in the ability to avoid false alarms and in some kinds of source monitoring but not hits. In contrast, working memory tended to correlate with all forms of memory including hits.

Fact or fantasy? A review of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse

More than a century ago Freud provoked a bitter controversy concerning alleged recollections of childhood sexual abuse: Were they fact or fiction? This debate is still ongoing, with some professionals stubbornly holding on to deeply entrenched and polarised positions. On the one side there are those who continue to deny the veracity of all 'recovered memories', and thus also of the implicated psychological defenses of repression and dissociation. At the other extreme are those therapists who simplistically assume that particular symptoms invariably imply sexual abuse. Over the decades there is a growing corpus of anecdotal, clinical and, more recently, research evidence supporting the contention that childhood sexual abuse, like all other trauma, can be forgotten for days, and even for many years, before being recalled. However, the reconstruction of these memories is a complex and, at times, a rather fallible process.

Children's testimony: a review of research on memory for past experiences

This review of children's testimony focuses on research related to memory for past experiences. The aspects of the memory system that are involved in testimony are discussed and the development of autobiographical memory is examined. Relevant research findings are summarized in the context of an information-processing model of memory and the implications of this work for clinical practice are outlined. We conclude that (1) under certain conditions, even very young children can remember and report past experiences with some accuracy over very long periods of time; (2) substantial and significant developmental differences have been demonstrated in children's abilities to provide eyewitness testimony; (3) children can be influenced in a variety of ways to provide complete and elaborated reports of events that never occurred; and (4) even experts cannot always tell the difference between true and false reports.

Draw It again Sam: the effect of drawing on children's suggestibility and source monitoring ability

Preschool children (aged 3 to 6 years) participated in a magic show. Later, the children were given repeated true and false reminders about the show. Half the children were asked to draw these true and false reminders (drawing condition) and half the children were asked questions about the reminders but not to draw them (question condition). Later, children in the drawing condition had better recall of true reminders than children in the question group; however, children in the drawing group also recalled more false reminders than children in the question group. Finally, although children in the drawing group had better memory of the source of the reminders than children in the question group, both groups equally reported that the false reminders actually happened.

Memory development and event-related brain potentials in children

This review examines the evidence for the maturation of memory function during childhood using event-related brain potentials (ERP), and behavioral measures. It has been shown that brain structures implicated in different forms of memory mature during the first and into the second decade of life. Whereas the maturation rates of implicit and explicit memory have not been directly assessed in the literature, studies of the maturation of the corresponding brain regions imply that there should be a progression in the maturation of the different forms of memory. This review also motivates the use of brain imaging techniques for investigation of memory systems during the developing years. Although, only a handful of such studies with children are currently available, they demonstrate that such techniques can provide information that may be unavailable otherwise. For example, when children fail to generate the ERP old/new effect, an index of episodic retrieval, it has been suggested that they may lack the necessary pre-existing representations in their long-term lexical or semantic memories. Similarly, age-related differences in ERP scalp topography during source memory paradigms suggest that children, who do not appear to show frontal scalp activity, lack inputs from frontal regions that are necessary for successful retrieval of source information. Future research with children will reveal more details about the nature of mnemonic processing during the developmental years.

Trauma and Delayed Memory: A Review of the "Repressed Memories" Literature

This review aims to draw balanced conclusions about trauma and memory from the intensely polarized debate currently raging over "repressed" memories, or better, delayed memories (hereafter DM). Research suggests that: emotion impacts memory; psychogenic amnesia can be a reaction to unusual levels of trauma; memory is malleable and delayed memories are prone to errors; however, inaccuracies in traumatic memories are more likely to be in peripheral details than central details. Also reviewed are infantile amnesia, clinical surveys on DM, and two psychoanalytic perspectives on DM. Treatment recommendations are culled from the literature. In order that the debate over adult DM not divert attention from the reality of child abuse and its damage, child abuse issues begin and end the review.

Emotion and memory: Children's long-term remembering, forgetting, and suggestibility

Children's memories for an experienced and a never-experienced medical procedure were examined. Three- to 13-year-olds were questioned about a voiding cystourethrogram fluoroscopy (VCUG) they endured between 2 and 6 years of age. Children 4 years or older at VCUG were more accurate than children younger than 4 at VCUG. Longer delays were associated with providing fewer units of correct information but not with more inaccuracies. Parental avoidant attachment style was related to increased errors in children's VCUG memory. Children were more likely to assent to the false medical procedure when it was alluded to briefly than when described in detail, and false assents were related to fewer "do-not-know" responses about the VCUG. Results have implications for childhood amnesia, stress and memory, individual differences, and eyewitness testimony.

THE SUGGESTIBILITY OF CHILDREN'S MEMORY

In this review, we describe a shift that has taken place in the area of developmental suggestibility. Formerly, studies in this area indicated that there were pronounced age-related differences in suggestibility, with preschool children being particularly susceptible to misleading suggestions. The studies on which this conclusion was based were criticized on several grounds (e.g. unrealistic scenarios, truncated age range). Newer studies that have addressed these criticisms, however, have largely confirmed the earlier conclusions. These studies indicate that preschool children are disproportionately vulnerable to a variety of suggestive influences. There do not appear to any strict boundary conditions to this conclusion, and preschool children will sometimes succumb to suggestions about bodily touching, emotional events, and participatory events. The evidence for this assertion is presented in this review.

Memory states and memory tasks: an integrative framework for eyewitness memory and suggestibility

An integrative framework (IMP) is presented which depicts performance in eyewitness suggestibility experiments as the participants' solutions of memory tasks, depending on (a) a specified task-relevant memory base and (b) the participants' perception of the memory task. Three theoretical explanations of the effect of misleading post-event information are reinterpreted and reduced to one single core: individuals answer test questions while assuming the consistency of event and post-event information. The impact of such consistency assumptions (a) is demonstrated in a first experiment, where the usual misinformation effect obtained with the Loftus standard test procedure disappeared when the participants' consistency assumptions were destroyed prior to testing, and (b) manifests itself in a qualitative analysis of individual processing strategies for discrepancies between details. Experiment 2, employing methodological innovations suggested by IMP, examined the memory base and found no evidence for memory impairment or misattributions of post-event details to the witnessed scene. However, a follow-up study conducted four and a half months later revealed a strong tendency for such misattributions which might indicate long-term integration of information.

Creating false memories for visual scenes

Creating false memories has become an important tool to investigate the processes underlying true memories. In the course of investigating the constructive and/or reconstructive processes underlying the formation of false memories, it has become clear that paradigms are needed that can create false memories reliably in a variety of laboratory settings. In particular, neuroimaging techniques present certain constraints in terms of subject response and timing of stimuli that a false memory paradigm needs to comply with. We have developed a picture paradigm which results in the false recognition of items of a scene which did not occur almost as often as the true recognition of items that did occur. It uses a single presentation of pictures with thematic, stereotypical scenes (e.g. a beach scene). Some of the exemplars from the scene were removed (e.g. a beach ball) and used as lures during an auditory recognition test. Subjects' performance on this paradigm was compared with their performance on the word paradigm reintroduced by Roediger and McDermott. The word paradigm has been useful in creating false memories in several neuroimaging studies because of the high frequency of false recognition for critical lures (words not presented but closely associated with lists of words that were presented) and the strong subjective sense of remembering accompanying these false recognitions. However, it has several limitations including small numbers of lures and a particular source confusion. The picture paradigm avoids these limitations and produces identical effects on normal subjects.

"Are false memories permanent?": an investigation of the long-term effects of source misattributions

With growing concerns over children's suggestibility and how it may impact their reliability as witnesses, there is increasing interest in determining the long-term effects of induced memories. The goal of the present research was to learn whether source misattributions found by Ceci, Huffman, Smith, and Loftus (1994) caused permanent memory alterations in the subjects tested. When 22 children from the original study were reinterviewed 2 years later, they recalled 77% of all true events. However, they only consented to 13% of all false events, compared to the 22% false consent rate (among the same subset of children) found by Ceci et al. (1994). Additionally, while children remained accurate in their recall of true events (they maintained assents 78% of the time), they "recanted" their earlier false consents 77% of the time, after the 2-year delay. Implications of these findings for child witnesses and the legal system are discussed.

How suggestible are preschool children? Cognitive and social factors

OBJECTIVES

In this series of studies, the authors sought to determine some of the cognitive and social boundary conditions that can undermine the accuracy of young children's reporting. Care was taken to include events and interviewing variables that more accurately reflect the experiences of children in real-world investigations of alleged sexual abuse. Videotaped interviews with preschool children were presented to experts to determine how adept they are at distinguishing between true and false accounts.

METHOD

All the studies were designed to investigate the susceptibility to suggestion in young preschool children. The difference between studies was the form of that suggestion and the nature of the event to which the children were exposed. All studies measured recall accuracy, false assent rate, and the change in these outcomes over time and/or successive interviews.

RESULTS

Very young preschool children (aged 3 and 4 years) were significantly more vulnerable to suggestions than were older preschool children (aged 5 and 6 years). The number of interviews and the length of the interval over which they were presented resulted in the greatest level of suggestibility.

CONCLUSIONS

While some types of events (negative, genital, salient) were more difficult to implant in children's statements, some children appeared to internalize the false suggestions and resisted debriefing. These children's false statements were quite convincing to professionals, who were unable to distinguish between true and false accounts.

Memory recovery and repression: what is the evidence?

Both the theory that traumatic childhood memories can be repressed, and the reliability of the techniques used to retrieve these memories are challenged in this paper. Questions are raised about the robustness of the theory and the literature that purports to provide scientific evidence for it. Evidence to this end is provided by the authors which surveyed New Zealand families in which one member had accused another (or others) of sexual abuse on the basis of recovered memories. It is shown that a number of these allegations involve very low probability events. Since memory repression theory is not currently scientifically substantiated it is argued that care needs to be taken in the mental health, legal and insurance compensation arenas. Memories recalled during therapy may be treated as metaphorical but, in the absence of corroborative evidence, should not be considered factually true. Clinicians who wish to use memory recovery techniques should inform patients of their experimental and controversial nature, point out adverse effects, and obtain consent before proceeding.

Anatomically-neutral dolls: their effects on the memory and suggestibility of 4- to 6-year-old eyewitnesses

The purpose of this investigation was to compare the amount and accuracy of details provided in the eyewitness accounts of preschool-aged children interviewed exclusively with a verbal interview against those interviewed with anatomically-neutral dolls in addition to a verbal interview. Forty-four children, aged 4 to 6 years, were paired up and assigned as participants or observers for an event they engaged in with a confederate. Children's memory was assessed afterwards by (a) The Step-Wise Interview (Yuille, Hunter, Joffe, & Zaparniuk, 1993); (b) the Step-Wise Interview and big dolls; or (c) The Step-Wise Interview and small, detailed dolls and props. Three leading questions were incorporated into the interviews. Results indicated no main effect of interview type on the overall amount or accuracy of the children's accounts. No main effects for interview type or participant versus observer condition were observed for the leading questions. Relative to 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds recalled a greater number of overall details and were more accurate in their accounts with both types of dolls. Females were more accurate than males in their accounts with the small detailed toys and props. Implications for the use of anatomically-neutral dolls in child sexual abuse investigations are discussed.