Evidence Commons^™

The putative confession instruction (“[suspect] told me everything that happened and wants you to tell the truth”) during forensic interviews with children has been shown to increase the accuracy of children’s statements, but it is unclear whether adult’s perceptions are sensitive to this salutary effect. The present study examined how adults perceive children’s true and false responses to the putative confession (PC) instruction. Participants (n = 299) watched videotaped interviews of children and rated the child’s credibility and the truthfulness of his/her statements. When viewing children’s responses to the PC instruction, true and false statements were rated as equally credible, …

This study examined the effects of rapport (emotional, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD]) and prompt type (what-next, cued-action, cued-emotion, what-think) on one hundred forty-two 4-9-year-old maltreated children's spontaneous and prompted emotional language.  Children in the emotional-rapport condition narrated the last time they felt good and the last time they felt bad on the playground. Children in the NICHD-rapport condition narrated their last birthday party and what happened yesterday. Following rapport, all children were presented a series of story stems about positive and negative situations. Emotional-rapport minimally affected children’s use of emotional language. Cued-emotion prompts were most …

What do we know about children's abilities to provide eyewitness testimony? Until recently, scientific data wee surprisingly sparse.  However, beginning in the mid-1980s, the study of child victims/witnesses grew at an astounding rate; now it is a worldwide endeavor. When Melton (1981) published one of the first modern reviews of psychological research on children's testimony, only one contemporary empirical study directly dressing children's eyewitness memory was cited. Today, entire books and journal issues are devoted to research on this topic (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Dent & Flin, 1992; Goodman, 1984; Goodman & Bottoms, 1993; Perry & Wrightsman, 1991; Poole …