Children's memories of a physical examination involving genital touch: implications for reports of child sexual abuse

Implicit Encouragement: Enhancing Youth Productivity when Recounting a Stressful Experience

In recent years, increasing efforts have been focused on testing strategies of improving victimized children's narrative productivity, given that, for many youth, finding out what has happened to them is crucial to intervening and promoting their well-being. Implicit encouragement strategies, such as back channeling by conversational partners, have shown some preliminary promise, but their precise effects on productivity and accuracy have not been adequately examined. In this study, 98 youth, ages 8-14, completed a laboratory-based stressful activity, and a week later, a surprise memory test regarding what happened in the lab activity. Interviewers varied their use of implicit encouragement. Open-ended recall questions asked youth about both factual details and detail about their feelings and thoughts during the laboratory activity. Implicit encouragement increased the amount of both types of details and had no effect on errors. In fact, few youth provided any incorrect information in their recall reports. Neither age nor stress was related to youth's productivity or accuracy, directly or in conjunction with implicit encouragement. Results highlight the value of interviewers using encouraging behaviors when questioning children and adolescents to elicit a range of information about prior stressful experiences.

Investigating linguistic coherence relations in child sexual abuse: A comparison of PTSD and non-PTSD children

Background

Language is the most common way to communicate internal states and emotions into a narrative form. Studies on the use of language provide a useful understanding of how people process an event and interpret it.

Objective

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of PTSD on the narrative coherence of children's reports of sexual abuse.

Participants and setting

Narrative coherence was analyzed within a group of 89 allegations of children (M = 10; range: 4–16), who were victims of sexual abuse. Thirty-seven children presented the symptoms for a diagnosis of PTSD.

Method

Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) was employed and narrative coherence was analyzed through some linguistic markers (first-person singular pronouns, conjunctions, and cognitive words).

Results

Results illustrated the effects of PTSD on the narrative coherence, in terms of first-person singular pronouns, conjunctions, and cognitive processes. Indeed, compared with traumatic narratives of children without PTSD, traumatic narratives of children with PTSD contained a greater number of first-person singular pronouns (M_PTSD = 1.45 versus M_no-PTSD = 1.12) and a smaller number of conjunctions (M_PTSD = .37 versus M_non-PTSD = .67), cognitive (M_PTSD = 2.93 versus M_non-PTSD = 3.76) and insight words (M_PTSD = 2.29 versus M_non-PTSD = 3.09). Regression analyses were used to examine if age and PTSD were predictors of the narrative coherence, suggesting the effects of PTSD in predicting the use of the first-person singular pronouns and the conjunctions.

Conclusion

This study could underline the importance of considering the PTSD in legal testimony of children who have been sexually abused.

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.'

Divining Testimony? The Impact of Interviewing Props on Children's Reports of Touching

There is a long-held assumption that objects help bridge the gap between what children know and what they can (or are willing to) explain. In this review, we present research on the extent to which two types of objects used as props in investigative interviews of children, anatomical dolls and body (human figure) diagrams, actually help children report accurate information about autobiographical events. We explain why available research does not instill confidence that props are the best solution to interviewing challenges, and we consider practitioners' and policy-makers responses to this evidence. Finally, we discuss the types of developmental research that are necessary to advance the field of evidence-based interviewing of children.

Forensic Interviewing Aids: Do Props Help Children Answer Questions About Touching?

The belief that props help children report abuse has fostered the widespread use of anatomical dolls and body diagrams in forensic interviews. Yet studies involving alleged abuse victims, children who have experienced medical examinations, and children who have participated in staged events have failed to find consistent evidence that props improve young children's ability to report key information related to bodily contact. Because props elevate the risk of erroneous touch reports, interviewers need to reconsider the belief that props are developmentally appropriate in forensic interviews, and researchers need to explore new approaches for eliciting disclosures of inappropriate touching.

Human figure drawings and children's recall of touching

In 2 studies, children ages 3 to 7 years were asked to recall a series of touches that occurred during a previous staged event. The recall interview took place 1 week after the event in Study 1 and immediately after the event in Study 2. Each recall interview had 2 sections: In 1 section, children were given human figure drawings (HFDs) and were asked to show where the touching took place; in the other section, the same questions were asked without the HFDs (verbal condition). Children were randomly assigned to 2 different conditions: HFD 1st/verbal 2nd or verbal 1st/HFD 2nd. There were 2 major findings. First, HFDs elicited more errors than the verbal condition when used to probe for information that the child had already been asked. Second, regardless of interview method, children had poor recall of the touches even when these occurred minutes before the interview. It is suggested that cognitive mechanisms involving memory and semantics underlie children's poor recall of touching in both verbal and HFD conditions.

Do human figure diagrams help alleged victims of sexual abuse provide elaborate and clear accounts of physical contact with alleged perpetrators?

The present study examined whether the use of human figure diagrams within a well-structured interview was associated with more elaborate and clearer accounts about physical contact that had occurred in the course of an alleged abuse. The sample included investigative interviews of 88 children ranging from 4 to 13 years of age. Children were interviewed using the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol, and were then asked a series of questions in association with unclothed gender-neutral outline diagrams of a human body. A new coding scheme was developed to examine the types and clarity of touch-related information. Use of the HFDs was associated with reports of new touches not mentioned before and elaborations regarding the body parts reportedly touched. The HFDs especially helped clarify reports by the oldest rather than the youngest children. The clarity of children's accounts of touch was also greater when details were sought using recall prompts.

True and False Memories in Maltreated Children

Differences in basic memory processes between maltreated and nonmaltreated children were examined in an experiment in which middle-socioeconomic-status (SES; N = 60), low-SES maltreated (N = 48), and low-SES nonmaltreated (N = 51) children (ages 5-7, 8-9, and 10-12 years) studied 12 Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists. Using recall and recognition measures, the results showed that both true and false memories increased with age and, contrary to some speculation, these trends did not differ as a function of maltreatment status. However, there were differences in overall memory performance as a function of SES. These results are discussed in the broader framework of children's memory development and the effects of the chronic stress associated with child maltreatment on basic memory processes.