Children's memory for traumatic experiences

Considerations for Pursuing Multiple Session Forensic Interviews in Child Sexual Abuse Investigations

Multiple session forensic interviews (MSFI) are a useful tool in the field of child sexual abuse forensic interviewing given the complexity of disclosures and the variety of child-centered needs observed in practice. This paper focuses on the Children's Advocacy Centers of Texas (CACTX) model for conducting MSFIs, illustrated by a description of the statewide training models offered to member centers and enumeration of the MSFI protocol guidelines implemented by one center. A brief history and review of the single session forensic interview (SSFI) is provided followed by considerations for MSFIs in order to establish the development of current and new practices. Clarification of terms are outlined with examples of cases to distinguish between multiple sessions and subsequent sessions. The MSFI guidelines presented demonstrate how an MSFI can fit with the SSFI model.

Effects of Different Timing of Alveolar Bone Graft on Craniofacial Morphology in Unilateral Cleft Lip and Palate

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the effect of the timing of secondary alveolar bone graft (SABG) on craniofacial morphology in patients with complete unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP).

DESIGN

Single-center retrospective assessment of consecutively treated nonsyndromic patients with complete UCLP.

PARTICIPANTS

One hundred sixty-seven patients (108 males, 59 females) with complete UCLP in whom the cleft was repaired with 1-stage method at approximately 8 months of age. The age of 128 patients at SABG varied from 1.4 to 11.5 years (SABG group), while 39 patients still awaited SABG at the moment of cephalometric evaluation (no-SABG group).

METHODS

Craniofacial morphology was assessed on lateral cephalograms taken at 10 years of age (standard deviation = 0.8; range: 7.5-12.3) using linear and angular measurements. T tests and regression models were made to analyze data.

RESULTS

Regression models demonstrated that the effect of SABG on the craniofacial morphology was limited-cephalometric variables which were statistically significantly different between SABG and no-SABG groups showed no association with the timing of SABG when (1) age of primary repair of the cleft, (2) age of cephalometric evaluation, (3) cleft side, (4) gender, and (5) operator were controlled for. Only the length of the maxilla (Condylion-point A) was affected-1-year delay of SABG corresponded with an increase in Co-point A distance by 0.52 mm. However, adjusted R ² of the model was 0.11.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings cautiously indicate that SABG performed before 8 years of age can have limited negative effect on craniofacial morphology. Nevertheless, our results should be confirmed by cleft centers practicing alternative surgical repairs of the cleft.

Comparing Children's Memories for Negative Versus Positive Events in the Context of Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms

How well children remember negative events is not fully understood. Previous research has failed to simultaneously test memory and perceptions of memory for both negative and positive events. Children (n = 38, 7-17 years) recruited from a hospital following accidental injury were tested for their memory of an injury-producing accident (negative event) and a positive event (unexpectedly receiving a $50 gift voucher). Objective accuracy of memory, memory quality characteristics (e.g., how coherently the event was recalled), children's judgments of their memory (meta-cognitive), and posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms were assessed 2 months post-injury. Children's memories for their experiences were verified using witness/parent reports. Memory quality characteristics of children's free recollection were coded with a previously used standardized system. Overall, children showed high levels of accuracy for both events, with little degradation over time. High PTS children showed little evidence of deficits in coherence or organization in their narratives relative to low PTS children. Although in some instances high PTS children judged their memory quality to be poor compared to low PTS children, this depended on how this was assessed (e.g., self-report questionnaire vs. coded narratives). In terms of limitations, it is unclear whether the findings will generalize for memories of repeated events. Witness verification of the accident details itself could be prone to error. In conclusion, the findings are broadly supportive of the proposal made by theorists who argue that trauma memories are recalled no less accurately than other distinctive memories. The role of meta-cognitive elements of children's memory and reporting in PTS is less clear.

Childhood Amnesia in Children: A Prospective Study Across Eight Years

This was a prospective study of earliest memories across 8 years for 37 children who were of age 4-9 years initially. In three interviews (initial and after 2 and 8 years) children provided their three earliest memories; those from earlier interviews that were not spontaneously provided later were cued. There was little consistency in the earliest memory or overlap across interviews in spontaneous memories. The youngest group also forgot over half their initial memories although few were forgotten by older children. For consistency of content, 25%-32% of information by former 6- to 9-year-olds was the same after 8 years, but < 10% provided by the youngest children was the same and 22% was contradictory. Emotion and contextual coherence predicted memory retention.

Children and Natural Disasters

Worldwide children are impacted by natural disasters, including hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, landslides and sandstorms, winter and severe storms, heat waves, volcanoes and tsunamis. School psychologists should understand natural disaster effects, such as economic loss, relocation and health concerns and mental health issues. While most children are able to cope, a significant minority develops severe symptoms and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). School psychologists should gain trauma mental health training through the American Psychological Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the International School Psychology Association. They can also be involved in school and community prevention, mitigation and educational programming. This article presents an overview for school psychologists of the literature on children in natural disasters.

Serial reproduction of traumatic events: does the chain unravel?

Our goal in this paper is to show that a careful analysis of recall accuracy within a serial reproduction chain can add to a detailed qualitative analysis of the reproductions within the chain. The texts we chose are based on newspaper reports concerning current events, which are far from being mundane: reports of tragic events, even traumatic events. The participants were 216 students who were randomly assigned to 54 four-person reproduction chains, 18 for each of three 160-word texts. The reproduction chain is highly dependent on the recall accuracy of the first generation (i.e., the first participant in the reproduction chain). Thus, we argue (and show) that there should be a qualitative difference between chains starting off with a high level of recall accuracy from those starting off with a low level of recall accuracy. Our data-analytic approach is based on trend analysis, which we argue is an apt quantitative, holistic, dynamic, process-oriented type of analysis that is required in such research.

Autobiographical memory specificity in child sexual abuse victims

The present study examined the specificity of autobiographical memory in adolescents and adults with versus without child sexual abuse (CSA) histories. Eighty-five participants, approximately half of whom per age group had experienced CSA, were tested on the autobiographical memory interview. Individual difference measures, including those for trauma-related psychopathology, were also administered. Findings revealed developmental differences in the relation between autobiographical memory specificity and CSA. Even with depression statistically controlled, reduced memory specificity in CSA victims relative to controls was observed among adolescents but not among adults. A higher number of posttraumatic stress disorder criteria met predicted more specific childhood memories in participants who reported CSA as their most traumatic life event. These findings contribute to the scientific understanding of childhood trauma and autobiographical memory functioning and underscore the importance of considering the role of age and degree of traumatization within the study of autobiographical memory.

Pain is not over when the needle ends: a review and preliminary model of acute pain memory development in childhood

SUMMARY Over the past several decades, the field of pediatric pain has made impressive advances in our understanding of the pain experience of the developing child, as well as the devastating impact of inadequately managed pain early in life. It is now well recognized that, from infancy, children are capable of developing implicit memories of pain that can influence their subsequent reactions to pain. The present review provides a synthesis of selected studies that made a significant impact on this field of inquiry, with particular emphasis on recent clinical and laboratory-based experimental research examining children’s explicit autobiographical memories for acute pain. Research has begun to move towards improving the precision with which children at risk for developing negatively estimated pain memories can be identified, given the adverse influence these memories can have on subsequent pain experiences. As such, several fear- and anxiety-related child and parent variables implicated in this process are discussed, and avenues for future research and clinical intervention are identified throughout. Finally, a preliminary empirically and theoretically derived model of acute pain memory development in childhood is presented to parsimoniously summarize the evidence accumulated to date and guide future investigation in this area.

The role of repeated interviewing in children's responses to cross-examination-style questioning

The negative effect of cross-examination-style questioning on children's accuracy is likely to be due to the complex and credibility-challenging questions that characterize the interview. Given that cross-examination occurs after at least one prior interview, however, it is equally possible that repeated interviewing per se impairs children's accuracy, and that the questions asked have little bearing on children's responses. To examine this issue, 5- and 6-year-old children (n= 82) and 9- and 10-year-old children (n= 103) took part in a surprise event and were then interviewed using an analogue of direct examination. Either 1 week or 6 months later, half of the children were re-interviewed with an analogue of cross-examination designed to challenge their direct examination responses. Remaining children were re-interviewed with the same questions that were asked during direct examination. Children's accuracy decreased following their second interview, irrespective of age or delay; however, delay particularly impacted younger children's second interview performance. Children's accuracy was most impaired following a cross-examination-style interview. Overall, cross-examination-style questioning appears to be particularly detrimental to obtaining accurate event reports from children.

The veridicality of children's reports of parenting: a review of factors contributing to parent-child discrepancies

Child informants routinely participate in forensic and social service investigations and are often a critical source of information. However, across research domains high levels of discrepancy between parents' reports and children's reports have been documented, which has led researchers to question children's abilities to provide accurate information about others' behavior. To date research examining parent-child discrepancies has focused on discrepancies in reports of child behavior. The aim of the present review is to examine children's abilities to provide veridical accounts of parental behaviors, drawing on developmental and clinical research to delineate factors likely to enhance or impede accuracy. Among the factors examined, age appears to have the strongest influence on the accuracy of children's reports in general. A clear distinction also emerged in the literature between children's abilities to report objective data versus information regarding abstract concepts. Although available evidence provides mixed support for the veridicality of children's reports of parenting, factors that influence children's accuracy have generally been overlooked. Namely, researchers have largely failed to discriminate between assessment of child-rearing behaviors and children's perceptions of those behaviors. The present review proposes that such failure likely accounts for a notable portion of parent-child discrepancies in reports of parenting.

Collaborative remembering of emotional events: the case of Rabin's assassination

Individual and collaborative remembering of the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin, were compared. In line with previous laboratory findings on memory of neutral stimuli, it was hypothesised that collaborative remembering (three individuals reaching a common response) and nominal remembering (three individual responses pooled together) of the assassination would be more accurate than individual remembering. A total of 146 participants responded (115 individually and 120 in groups of three) to open-ended and multiple-choice questionnaires (among them, 89 responded twice with a week of intertest interval) about Rabin's assassination and the events that preceded and followed it. Data analysis showed that the collaborative responses to the open-ended questionnaire contained more details (both accurate and inaccurate) than the individual responses, and that the responses to the multiple-choice questionnaire were more accurate than the individual responses. However, the collaborative responses contained fewer details (both accurate and inaccurate) than the nominal responses. Responses to the two questionnaires were more accurate on the retest when they followed collaborative rather than individual responses on the original test. The inferiority of the collaborative relative to the nominal remembering was attributed to collaborative inhibition, whereas the positive effect of collaborative remembering on performance on the retest was attributed to the contribution of contextual cues.

Cognitive Processes Underlying Coping Flexibility: Differentiation and Integration

This study investigates how individuals formulate flexible coping strategies across situations by proposing differentiation and integration as two stress-appraisal processes. Results showed that participants who coped more flexibly adopted the dimensions of controllability and impact in differentiating among different stressful situations. They also deployed an integrated strategy: the deployment of more monitoring in situations perceived as controllable but less of this strategy in situations perceived as uncontrollable. Participants who coped less flexibly did not adopt any given dimensions and tended to use more monitoring regardless of situational characteristics. These results suggest that individuals with different extents of coping flexibility differ in the cognitive processes. Individuals who cope more flexibly display a greater extent of differentiation and integration than do those who cope less flexibly. These findings are translated into strategies for stress management workshops.

The Time to Talk: The Influence of the Timing of Adult-Child Talk on Children's Event Memory

To investigate the influence of the nature and timing of adult-child talk on event recall, this study engaged 63 three-year-olds and 65 five-year-olds in a staged event and interviewed them 2 weeks later. Children were assigned to 1 of 4 conditions: elaborative pre-, during-, and post-talk, and empty talk (during the event). Children in the elaborative, relative to the empty, talk conditions made fewer errors. Furthermore, post-talk had the greatest influence on correct recall, although for the 5-year-olds, during-talk was also facilitative. Recall was enhanced to a greater extent by the child's contribution to the talk, relative to that of the adult. The findings contribute to an understanding of the mechanisms by which adult-child conversations influence recall.

Behavioral Measurement of Remembering Phenomenologies: So Simple a Child Can Do It

Two remembering phenomenologies, vivid recollection and vague familiarity, have been extensively studied in adults using introspective self-report tasks, such as remember-know. Because such tasks are beyond the capabilities of young children, there is no database on how these phenomenologies first develop and what factors affect them. In experiments with 5- to 14-year-olds, a child-appropriate behavioral methodology (conjoint recognition) was used to measure these phenomenologies. For both true and false memory, there were marked age increases in vivid recollective experiences, coupled with only slight increases in vague familiarity experiences. Thus, there is a vague-to-vivid developmental shift in the mental states that accompany remembering, a finding that is predicted by fuzzy-trace theory's explanation of recollection and familiarity.

Measuring child sexual abuse in children and youth

Asking children and adolescents directly about their experience of sexual victimization overcomes some of the methodological weaknesses inherent in other approaches. Yet complex legal, ethical, and methodological issues remain. This paper reviews the psychometric properties of those questions or instruments that have measured exposure to child sexual abuse directly. A search of four electronic databases using descriptors "child sexual abuse" and "measurement" or "instrumentation" yielded four telephone administered tools, 13 face-to-face interviews, and 32 self-administered questionnaires. Few instruments had been subjected to rigorous evaluation. Establishing the validity and reliability of instruments measuring child sexual abuse and other forms of victimization are critical for the growth and expansion of the field.

After the storm: enduring differences in mother-child recollections of traumatic and nontraumatic events

Despite a growing literature on the collaborative reminiscing of mothers and children, little is known about the kinds of things mothers and children discuss as they recollect shared traumatic experiences. Do mother-child recollections of a traumatic event differ from their recollections of more benign events? To address this question, mother-child dyads (N=29) discussed a traumatic event, namely a devastating tornado, and two nontraumatic events (one that preceded and one that followed the tornado). Each dyad discussed all three events 4-months post-tornado and again 6 months later. Whereas conversations about both event types (traumatic and nontraumatic) varied with children's age, dyads' recollections of the tornado were significantly longer, more narratively coherent, and more complete than their recollections of nontraumatic events. These differences largely endured over the 6-month retention interval.

The role of attachment and cognitive inhibition in children's memory and suggestibility for a stressful event

There has been increasing interest in children's abilities to report memories of and resist misleading suggestions about distressing events. Individual differences among children and their parents may provide important insight into principles that govern children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility for such experiences. In the present study, 51 children between the ages of 3 and 7 years were interviewed about an inoculation after a delay of approximately 2 weeks. Results indicated that parents' attachment Avoidance was associated with children's distress during the inoculation. Parental attachment Anxiety and the interaction between parental Avoidance and children's stress predicted children's memory for the inoculation. Cognitive inhibition was also a significant predictor of children's memory errors and suggestibility. Theoretical implications concerning effects of stress and individual differences on children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility are discussed.

From infant to child: the dynamics of cognitive change in the second year of life

The authors review several key areas of early cognitive development in which an abrupt shift in ability at the end of the second year of life has been traditionally assumed. These areas include deferred imitation, self-recognition, language, and categorization. Contrary to much conventional theorizing, the evidence shows robust continuities in all domains of early cognitive development. Where there is evidence of a reorganization of behavior that makes a new level of performance possible, dynamic-systems analyses indicate that even these may be driven by underlying processes that are continuous. Although there remain significant definitional and methodological issues to be resolved, the outcome of this review augers well for newer models in which cognitive development is viewed as a continuous, dynamic process.

Remembering and reporting by children: the influence of cues and props

Until recently nonverbal props received little experimental attention in spite of the wide use of props such as toys and drawing in child clinical contexts. This article reviews research investigating the effectiveness of props as means of facilitating children's recall and reporting of past events. In the first section, developmental and theoretical considerations influencing effectiveness of various kinds of props as aids to the retrieval and communication of information are outlined. Thereafter, findings of empirical research are reviewed for real props from the event, toys including dolls, drawing, context reinstatement, and photographs. Research findings suggest that a range of factors influence the extent to which props facilitate children's reports of past events, including specificity of the information provided by the prop, the way the prop is presented during the interview, delay between the event and interview and, critical to these factors, the age of the child. Areas requiring future theoretical and research attention are identified.

Distinctiveness effects in children's long-term retention

In 3 experiments, kindergarten and second-grade children's retention was examined in the context of 2 distinctiveness manipulations, namely, the von Restorff and bizarre imagery paradigms. Specifically, children learned lists of pictures (Experiments 1a and 1b) or interactive images (Experiment 2) and were asked to recall them 3 weeks later. In Experiments 1a and 1b, distinctiveness was manipulated perceptually (changing colors) and conceptually (changing categories or switching to a numeral), whereas in Experiment 2, distinctiveness concerned the interaction (common or bizarre) between the referents. The results showed that (a) older children retained more information than younger children, (b) younger but not older children failed to benefit from numerically distinct information, and (c) distinctiveness in other domains facilitated children's retention. These results highlight the importance of distinctive information in children's retention.

Fuzzy-trace theory and false memory: new frontiers

We describe the origins of fuzzy-trace theory, including Piagetian, interference, information-processing, and judgment and decision-making influences. The contrasting properties of gist and verbatim memory serve as its foundation and, in recent models of spontaneous and implanted false memories, explain seemingly contradictory developmental trends, such as reverse developmental findings, differential time courses for true and false memories, and conflicting effects of trace strength. However, approaches that integrate fuzzy-trace theory with neurological, social, emotional, and motivational perspectives are needed. A method for accomplishing this integration, using the recent models, is introduced and new research that spans these perspectives is discussed. Relations to other contemporary theories, especially source-monitoring and dual-process theories, are also explained. We conclude by rejecting the notion that spontaneous false memories are actually "true" and distinguish gist and verbatim senses of the term "true" that have different consequences in real life.