Memory and Suggestibility in the Forensic Interview

Mitchell L. Eisen, Jodi A. Quas, Gail S. Goodman, Mitchell L. Eisen, Jodi A. Quas, Gail S. Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9781135675097
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Memories are the ultimate foundation of testimony in legal settings ranging from criminal trials to divorce mediations and custody hearings. Yet the last decade has seen mounting evidence of various ways in which the accuracy of memories can be distorted on the one hand and enhanced on the other. This book offers a long-awaited comprehensive and balanced overview of what we now understand about children's and adults' eyewitness capabilities--and of the important practical and theoretical implications of this new understanding. The authors, leading clinicians and behavioral scientists with diverse training experiences and points of view, provide insight into the social, cognitive, developmental, and legal factors that affect the accuracy and quality of information obtained in forensic interviews.

Armed with the knowledge these chapters convey, practitioners in psychology, psychiatry, social work, criminology, law, and other relevant fields will be better informed about the strengths and limitations of witnesses' accounts; researchers will be better poised to design powerful new studies.

Memory and Suggestibility in the Forensic Interview will be a crucial resource for anyone involved in elucidating, interpreting, and reporting the memories of others.

IV
CHILDREN IN THE FORENSIC
INTERVIEW CONTEXT

14
Questions and Answers: The Credibility
of Child Witnesses in the Context
of Specific Questioning Techniques

Robyn Fivush
Emory University

Carole Peterson
Memorial University of Newfoundland

April Schwarzmueller
Eckerd College

Once children enter the legal system, as victims or witnesses, they are interviewed multiple times by multiple people before giving testimony in court (Myers, 1987). Interestingly, “common sense” beliefs about the effects of repeated interviews on children’s memories and/or reports of what transpired lead to contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, it is argued that repeatedly recalling an event helps children (and adults) to consolidate their memory of what occurred, leading to a more durable memory. On the other hand, repeatedly recalling an event can lead children (and adults) to begin to reconstruct what happened, adding details that make sense but that may not be accurate. Which position reflects what actually happens over the course of repeated interviews is critical, not only for theoretical reasons, but for interpreting and evaluating children’s testimony in applied forensic situations.

Two recent reviews of the literature (Fivush & Schwarzmueller, 1995; Poole & White, 1995) concur that simply asking children to recall an event again and again does not have a detrimental effect on their memory reports, and may even have beneficial effects under certain conditions. Indeed, everything we know about memory from experimental research indicates that repeatedly recalling an event is a form of rehearsal that helps buffer against forgetting (see Brainerd & Ornstein, 1991; Schwartz & Reisberg, 1991, for reviews). However, forensic interviews may not be as benign as most of the interviews conducted in experimental studies. When police, social workers, and lawyers interview children for legal purposes, they must often go beyond asking the child for free recall of what happened, and pose specific, and sometimes leading questions.

In this chapter, we extend the previous reviews of the effects of repeated interviews on children’s memories by considering forensic issues more completely. In the first section, we summarize the general effects of repeated questions both within the same interview and across interviews. Because this literature has been reviewed in detail so recently (Fivush & Schwarzmueller, 1995; Poole & White, 1995), we provide only a brief overview here. We then turn to the question of what happens over longer periods of time. Children often testify months or years after the actual event has occurred; it is therefore important to consider how and what young children are able to recall over long delays. The first two sections focus on children’s recall in the absence of misleading or suggestive questions. Most of this research examines children’s responses to general, open-ended questions, such as “What happened . . . ?” and “Tell me about. . . .” or nonleading questions such as “What did the person look like?” and “What was the person wearing?” In the third section, we consider the effects of repeatedly interviewing children in more suggestive or coercive ways, for example, by providing erroneous information in the question or by cajoling the child to respond. Finally, we examine the effects of specific question types on children’s memory reports. In particular, differences between questions that ask the child to recall a specific piece of information, and yes–no questions, questions that only require the child to acquiesce or deny a piece of information are compared. Throughout, we draw implications for forensic interviewing, and at the end, we provide some overall guidelines for forensic interviewing that emerge from the research.

REPEATED QUESTIONS

When children are interviewed for legal purposes, they are often asked the same questions over and over (Myers, 1987). When this occurs within the same interview, it is considered a “check” on the child’s accuracy; if the child gives a different answer to the same question asked again during the same interview, it is often assumed that the child’s testimony is not accurate. But, as several theorists have pointed out, this may be more a function of the social demands of the situation than of the child’s memory. When children are asked the same question again, they may assume that the adult interviewer did not approve of the first answer given (Moston, 1987; Rose & Blank, 1974). Especially in situations in which children may feel uncomfortable, as in being interviewed by a relative stranger about an upsetting event, children may change their answers in order to please the adult (Siegel, Waters, & Dinwiddy, 1988). Thus, it is important to bear in mind when interpreting the literature on suggestibility that children’s acceptance of erroneous information may be more a matter of changing their report as a function of the social context, than a change in the underlying memory.

Several studies have found that children are highly likely to change their answer the second time a question is asked within the same interview (Cassel & Bjorkland, 1995; Laumann & Elliot, 1992; Moston, 1987; Poole & White, 1991; Warren, Hulse-Trotter, & Tubbs, 1991). This is especially true for children age 6 and younger. For example, Cassel and Bjorkland (1995) found that 42% of the 6-year-olds in their study changed their responses to a specific question about a video of a bicycle theft (Did the boy have permission to take the bike?) the second time the question was asked, but few of the 8-year-olds changed their answer. It is also important to note here that children may be substantially more likely to change their answer when asked a leading question phrased as a yes–no question (e.g., The bike was stolen by the mother, wasn’t it?), than when asked to provide information (e.g., Who stole the bike?), an issue that we discuss at greater length later in this chapter. These results indicate that repeating a question within the same interview as a memory check for young children is often detrimental. Children, especially preschoolers, appear to respond to the repeated question as an indication that the adult was not pleased with their first answer, and are therefore likely to change their answer as a result of the social demands of the situation, not necessarily as a function of poor memory.

In contrast to repeating questions within the same interview, the social situation is quite different when the same question is asked repeatedly across separate interviews. Because time has passed between recall occasions, and often a different person is conducting the interview (e.g., a social worker, a police officer, or a lawyer), children may not think that a repeated question means that the first answer was not acceptable. Moreover, given the general finding in the memory literature that rehearsal buffers against forgetting (see Schwartz & Reisberg, 1991, for a review), there is good reason to predict that recalling an event on multiple occasions will help children report what occurred rather than hinder them.

Research examining the effects of previous interviews on children’s subsequent recall provides some support for this prediction, but it seems to be tempered by developmental differences. After examining repeated interviews over relatively brief durations of days or weeks, no study has found detrimental effects of repeated nonsuggestive interviews, in the sense that no study has found an increase in the amount of inaccurate information reported. And, for children aged 7 to 8 years or older, recalling an event even once often leads to better subsequent recall (Flin, Boon, Knox, & Bull, 1992; Memon, Wark, Bull, & Koehnken, 1995). Recalling an event once does not seem to be as beneficial for children younger than age 7, but recalling an event several times is beneficial for subsequent memory at all ages (Baker-Ward, Gordon, Ornstein, Larus, & Clubb, 1993; Baker-Ward, Hess, & Flannagan, 1990; Cassidy & DeLoache, 1995; Gee & Pipe, in press; Goodman, Bottoms, Schwartz-Kenney, & Rudy, 1991; Warren & Swartwood, 1992). Repeated interviews do not compromise children’s memory reports, and may even help children to recall more information, at least over short delays. (The way in which recall may change over more substantial delays is discussed in detail later.)

One reason why repeatedly recalling an event may lead to better subsequent memory is that in the process of recall, children reactivate the memory of the experience. Thus, recall may be similar to reexperiencing the event, leading to a stronger memory trace. It is also possible that recalling an event immediately after experiencing it serves to organize and consolidate the memory, and prepares children for subsequent verbal recall. If so, an immediate interview would be particularly beneficial for subsequent memory.

Yet several studies have found no effects of timing of the first recall; in general it does not seem to matter whether the interview occurs immediately or within a couple of weeks after the event for it to have a beneficial effect for older children. For younger children, when the interviews occur seems less important than the number of previous interviews. However, this remains an intriguing developmental question. It may still be the case that the first interview must occur within a specific time window for it to help buffer against forgetting, and this time window may be longer for older children than for younger children.

One line of research in support of this possibility comes from the infant memory literature. This literature obviously focuses on nonverbal memory of an event, and thus any parallels must be drawn with caution. However, for infants, the timing of reactivating a memory through partial reinstatement of the event is critical for subsequent retrieval. Using a conjugate reinforcement paradigm, in which infants learn to kick in order to make an attractive mobile move over their crib, Rovee-Collier and her colleagues (Boller, Rovee-Collier, Borovsky, O’Conner, & Shyi, 1990; Rovee-Collier & Gerhardstein, 1997) demonstrated that the period during which reactivation of a memory is effective follows a clear developmental trajectory, with older infants able to maintain the behavioral response without reinstatement for longer periods of time than younger infants. And Sheffield and Hudson (1994) have shown a similar pattern with toddlers; 1-year-old children need to be reminded of an event sooner than do 2-year-olds in order to be able to reenact the event when returned to the original context.

Evidence of memory through behavioral reenactment is obviously very different from verbal recall. Most important, verbal recall takes place outside of the spatial–temporal context of the original event, and this is not true for behavioral reenactment. Indeed, infants are heavily dependent on being back in the original context in which the event was experienced in order to evidence any memory of the event at all. Moreover, there is no evidence that events occurring before the ability to describe the event in language will ever become accessible for verbal recall (see Fivush, Pipe, Murachver, & Reese, 1997, for a review). Therefore, the data from the infant memory literature can only be taken as suggestive that, just as the timing of behavioral reinstatement is critical in extending the life of a behavioral response in infancy, the timing of verbal reinstatement through recalling an event may be critical for extending the life of a verbally accessible memory. In general, younger children show steeper forgetting curves than older children, at least for word lists, and possibly for complex events as well (see Brainerd, Reyna, Howe, & Kingma, 1990, for an overview). It may be the case that younger children need to verbally rehearse an event sooner after an event’s occurrence in order to buffer against long-term forgetting. Although the research indicates that an interview immediately after the event occurs is not critical, the first recall may have to occur within a specified period of time for it to be effective, and this timing may be developmentally sensitive.

Overall, whereas repeating questions within the same interview is usually detrimental especially for younger children, repeating questions across interviews does not have the same effect. In fact, repeated interviews may benefit long-term retention. For children older than about age 7, even one previous recall often leads to better subsequent recall. For children younger than 7, participating in one previous recall may or may not be effective, but participating in several previous recalls seems to be. An important avenue for further research is to examine the effects of the timing of interviews on children’s retention, in addition to the number of interviews.

CHILDREN’S RECALL OVER LONG DELAYS

Studies on repeated interviews tend to examine children’s memories over a relatively brief period of several weeks or a few months. But, just as children who enter the legal system are interviewed multiple times, it is also the case that children often testify in court several years after the actual event occurred (Myers, 1987). What is it that young children can remember about personally experienced events over such long delays? Warren and Swartwood (1992) asked children to recall how they heard about the Challenger space shuttle disaster at several time delays up to 2 years after the event. Whereas children older than age 8 at the time of the d...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND BASIC PROCESSES
• II. STRESS, TRAUMA, AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
• III. ADULTS IN THE FORENSIC INTERVIEW CONTEXT
• IV. CHILDREN IN THE FORENSIC INTERVIEW CONTEXT