UNIVERSITY OF REGINA CARMELI

City of Malolos
Graduate School Department

Name: Jaymilline C. Gaspar, RM, RN Course: MSN- MCN

Date: April 10, 2010 Professor: Dr. Balmonte

Describe how the research on children’s eyewitness testimony illustrates connections

among emotional, cognitive and social development.

During early childhood, children start to develop a "self-concept," the attributes, abilities,
attitudes and values that they believe define them. By age 3, (between 18 and 30 months),
children have developed their Categorical Self, which is concrete way of viewing
themselves in "this or that" labels. For example, young children label themselves in terms
of age "child or adult", gender "boy or girl", physical characteristics "short or tall", and
value, "good or bad." The labels are used to explain children's self-concept in very
concrete, observable terms. For example, Seth may describe himself this way: "I'm 4. I
have blue eyes. I'm shorter than Mommy. I can help Grandma set the table!" When asked,
young children can also describe their self-concept in simple emotional and attitude
descriptions. Seth may go on to say, "Today, I'm happy. I like to play with Amy."
However, preschoolers typically do not link their separate self-descriptions into an
integrated self-portrait. In addition, many 3-5 year olds are not aware that a person can
have opposing characteristics. For example, they don't yet recognize that a person can be
both "good" and "bad".

As long-term memory develops, children also gain the Remembered Self. The
Remembered Self incorporates memories (and information recounted by adults about
personal events) that become part of an individual's life story (sometimes referred to as
autobiographical memory). In addition, young children develop an Inner Self, private
thoughts, feelings, and desires that nobody else knows about unless a child chooses to
share this information.

Because early self-concepts are based on easily defined and observed variables, and
because many young children are given lots of encouragement, Preoperational children
often have relatively high self-esteem (a judgment about one's worth). Young children are
also generally optimistic that they have the ability to learn a new skill, succeed, and finish
a task if they keep trying, a belief called "Achievement-Related Attribution", or
sometimes "self-efficacy". Self-esteem comes from several sources, such as school
ability, athletic ability, friendships, relationships with caregivers, and other helping and
playing tasks.

As with emotional development, both internal and external variables can affect young
children's self-concept. For example, a child's temperament can affect how they view
themselves and their ability to successfully complete tasks. Children with easy
temperaments are typically willing to try things repeatedly and are better able to handle
frustrations and challenges. In contrast, children with more difficult temperaments may
become more easily frustrated and discouraged by challenges or changes in the situation.

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Children who can better cope with frustrations and challenges are more likely to think of
themselves as successful, valuable, and good, which will lead to a higher self-esteem. In
contrast, children who become easily frustrated and discouraged, often quit or need extra
assistance to complete a task. These children may have lower self-esteem if they start to
believe that they can't be successful and aren't valuable.

External factors, such as messages from other people, also color how children view
themselves. Young children with parents, caregivers, and teachers providing them with
positive feedback about their abilities and attempts to succeed (even if they aren't
successful the first time) usually have higher self-esteem. On the contrary, when parents,
caregivers, or teachers are regularly negative or punitive toward children's attempts to
succeed, or regularly ignore or downplay those achievements, young children will have a
poor self-image and a lower self-esteem.

Peers also have an impact on young children's self-concept. Young children who have
playmates and classmates that are usually nice and apt to include the child in activities
will develop a positive self-image. However, a young child who is regularly left out,
teased, or bullied by same-age or older peers can develop low self-esteem.

As mentioned repeatedly throughout this document, each child is unique, and he or she
may respond to different environments in different ways. Some young children are
naturally emotionally "resilient" in certain situations. Resilient children experience or
witness something seemingly negative or harmful, without experiencing damage to their
self-esteem or emotional development. Resilience not only enables such individuals to
withstand life stress, but quite often these children became high achievers. This ability
also helps resilient children to maintain good health and to resist mental and physical
illnesses. For example, many young children who are severely physically and/or
emotionally bullied perform poorly in school, become aggressive or withdrawn, or
depressed or anxious. Resilient children experience that same bullying and show no signs
or symptoms that the experience has negatively impacted them.

For more on how to positively impact a young child's emotional and self-identity
development, please see the article on Parenting Skills for the Preoperational Stage (this
article is not yet compete.)
Another more complex but highly important part of a child's self-identity is formed by
their cultural identity. While ideas about ancestry and how their family's culture fits into
the larger society are too abstract for most young people to understand, it's never too
early to teach children about cultural and religious traditions. Including young people in
important meals, celebrations, religious services, etc, and explaining what's going on in
simple terms is very important in passing on a sense of that child's cultural background.
Ideas such as, "My family goes to the synagogue on Saturdays," or "Grandma's
traditional soul food is yummy," become part of the child's self-concept. As time goes by
and children's capacities to understand what it means when someone says "I am Jewish",
or "I am an African American," these experiences will continue to add to and to enrich
their self-concept.

The law has traditionally viewed children as unreliable witnesses, based on perceptions
that they are prone to fantasy, that they are suggestible and that their evidence is
otherwise inaccurate. General attitudes toward child witnesses have changed dramatically
over the last decade, though some psychologists are still divided. Some deem children as
reliable and quite capable of providing accurate and detailed testimony (due to their
resistance to suggestion regarding events they took part in), whilst others describe them
as having difficulties in distinguishing reality, for which further questioning must be
initiated, and thus unreliable (Ceci & Bruck). But over all, it is logical to assume that
children have similar failings to their adult counterparts, with the possible exception of
being more easily confused by technical or complex questions.

When dealing with allegations that relate to the child’s personal experience we are
generally dealing with episodic memory. Episodic memory relates to remembering events
that have been personally experienced and making sense out of them. Procedures that are
utilised by the mind in creating memory are threefold. First, information must be
encoded. Some information is only encoded briefly. These short-term memories enter the
working memory that holds the information for short time periods. Second, memories
must be stored. Information that is not maintained in long-term memory cannot be
recalled later. Third, memories must be retrieved. A process goes on in the brain where
stored information is located and brought into awareness. Different components of a
memory, for example the sensory or visual aspects, may be stored in different parts of the
brain. The linking together of these various fragments becomes what a person
experiences as a memory.

Given that children's recall and recognition are thought to be inferior to the recall and
recognition of adults the question arises as to how much of this inferiority can be
attributed to each of the different stages of memory. The answer to this has great
significance in relation to the questioning of children as witnesses. If the inferiority of
children's recall and recognition is entirely attributable to encoding, then the only matter
that needs to be considered is the manner in which courts should receive children's
evidence. If, on the other hand, some or all the relative deficiency of children's recall and
recognition can be traced to retention and retrieval, then appropriate techniques that
minimise the deficiencies can be implemented.

Recall of more realistic material by different age groups has been investigated. In these
studies, people of different ages have been exposed to staged events or have viewed a
brief segment of a videotape. The findings of these studies suggest that the relationship
between recall and age is not a simple matter. Feben (1985) showed her subjects three-
minute videotape on ‘fire fighting’ and then tested the subjects' recall of details of the
tape. Feben found that young children's recall of specific features of objects depicted in
the tape, for example the colour of the fireman's buttons, did not differ greatly from that
of adults, but the accuracy of their recall of the theme and the sequence of events was
significantly lower.

Goodman and Reed (1986) attempted to examine recall by children and adults of their
interaction with an unfamiliar adult. Six- year- olds and adults achieved a similar level of
performance on their recall of events elicited by objective questions. However adults
recalled much more information, both correct and incorrect, than children. Saywitz
(1987) requested her subjects to listen to a description of a crime on audiotape and then
gave subjects three different types of memory tests: free recall, recognition, and a number
of questions about content that the subjects might not have considered pertinent to the
crime for example, asking for a description of clothing or details of the weather. There
were two findings of relevance. Firstly, eight and nine- year- olds embellished the story
more than older subjects. Secondly, when directed to specific objects and events, for
example clothing, young children were accurate in their recall of the features of these
objects and events. This latter finding is consistent with the findings of Feben (1985)
described above.

It seems that children’s memory for events can be changed by asking leading questions,
repeated yes or no questions, and by making misleading suggestions. The goal for
interviewing children is to avoid asking leading questions. Yet many courts allow some
degree of leading questions, otherwise, children will not speak at all. The problem is that
even the most harmless of questions could become leading questions. For example, if the
interviewer asks, "What happened when you were with Ken?" there is an assumption that
the child was in fact with Ken, and that something did indeed happen (Goodman &
Schaaf, 1997). Since it is virtually impossible not to ask leading questions, researchers
have looked at the extent to which questions are leading. Some questions, are very
leading, e.g., "He kissed you, didn’t he?" The goal in interviewing children is to avoid
asking this type of leading question.

Children may also give inaccurate testimony if the language of the questions asked is
complex. For example in one study with 5- to 7-year-olds, the question was, "The pirate
engaged in blowing bubbles during the course of the puppet show, is that not true?"
(Goodman & Schaaf, 1997). Children were 10% more likely to agree with this question
than when the question was more simply worded (e.g., the pirate blew bubbles, didn’t
he?" Children can also become more suggestible to leading questions if they feel
intimidated by the interviewer. Children are less susceptible if the interviewer is friendly
towards them.

Children’s recall of events can also be influenced by false information suggested by

others. For example, "How fast were the cars going when they ‘smashed’ into each
other?" suggests a very fast speed, compared to "How fast were the cars going when they
‘hit’ each other?" A study by Poole and Lindsay (1995) in Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology found that listening to false information could mislead 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year-
olds. Children interacted with a ‘Mr Science’. They were then interviewed using non-
suggestive techniques. The children gave lots of correct information about their
interactions with Mr Science. Three months later, some of the children listened to their
parents read a story about Mr Science that described events that they had, and had not
experienced. The children were interviewed again. The children made many false reports
in the second interview.

A study by Rudy and Goodman (1991) in Developmental Psychology, analysed the

extent to which 36 7- and 8-year-old children, and 18 4-year-olds, from middle-class
homes, had better recall if they participated in an event than if they observed the event.
The children were brought to the University by their parents. The researchers met the
parents, and organised the children into pairs. One of the children in each pair was
randomly made the "participant" and the other the "bystander". The participant was to
play the game "Simon says" with an adult stranger, while the other child watched the
game. For example, the child was asked to touch their own knee and then the knee of the
adult. The adult also dressed the child as a clown, and took a photo of the child. The adult
played a thumb-wrestling game with the child, which required the child to hold the
adult’s hand. All events were videotaped from behind a one-way mirror.

Children were interviewed about what happened about two weeks later. Parents were
shown the interview questions and had an opportunity to delete questions they did not
like. Parents also stayed with their children during each interview. First the children were
asked to recall what happened during the games. Then they were asked specific
questions, some of which were leading, and some of which were misleading. A
misleading question is where something is implied to have happened which didn’t happen
(e.g., "How many times did he smack you?") or had a tag that implied that the event in
the question was true (e.g., "He was very big, wasn’t he?"). The interview included
misleading questions, such as: "He didn’t touch you did he?", "Did he kiss you?” and "He
took your clothes off didn’t he?"

Results showed that younger children recalled less correct information than did older
children, especially about what happened, and about what the games were, though there
was no difference in memory for the adult person's appearance. There was also no
difference in total recall whether the children were participants or bystanders. In terms of
children’s memories, this was an unusual finding in that participation usually involves
giving more attention to the task, and more active processing, which should increase
recall. Yet this did not happen. In regard to misleading questions, the 4-year-olds were as
resistant as the 7-year-olds. Pre-operational children are supposed to be more open to
make-believe, but this did not happen. Among the 4-year-olds, the bystanders were more
open to misleading suggestions than were the 4-year-old participants. But further analysis
showed that even this "bystander" difference disappeared if "don’t know" answers were
included in the analysis of responses. A "don’t know" response could be interpreted as
"passive resistance" to suggestion (Rudy & Goodman, 1991, p. 535).

The researchers found hardly any "commission" errors for the misleading questions. A
commission error is where the child answers that something happened when it did not.
An omission error is when the child says something did not happen when it did. Younger
children made more omission errors. The researchers concluded that while older children
had better recall of what happened, younger children were a lot more resistant to
misleading questions than is often thought to be the case. Moreover, children’s recall, and
resistance to suggestion, was greater if they had actually participated in the event,
especially for the younger children.
Younger children had difficulty stating the adult’s age, but their scores improved
dramatically when given a photo identification line-up to look at. This relates to young
children’s difficulties in counting. A better procedure for them was the visual photo line-
up. Finally, one child came up with some magical interpretations, (e.g., that the adult
waved a magic wand to make the other little boy disappear). This links with young
children’s make-believe thinking.

Researchers have also found that children most likely to be vulnerable to leading
questions are 3- to 5-year-olds (Ceci, Ross, & Toglia, 1987). Preschoolers may think that
something happened because an adult has asked them about it. In other words they defer
to the status of the adult. Another possible reason why preschoolers give inaccurate
testimony is that their memories for events are likely to fade faster than older children
and adults, simply because they have less memory capacity.

Much of the research on children’s eyewitness memories has been carried out at a more
general theoretical level of children’s memory capacities and strategies, rather than at an
applied level, such as the specific problem of children’s ability to recall events in a
courtroom situation. Also, research on memory for possible abusive situations has been
conducted with non-abused children. This research has been with children who come
from protective families in middle-class homes. Abused children often come from very
different backgrounds, so it is not clear how well the research on this topic generalises to
the subjects of abuse.

Saywitz (1995) suggested several ways to improve children’s ability to testify accurately
in court. One way is to ask better questions. In a courtroom situation, children are faced
with very complex requirements. The vocabulary of questions can be problematic.
Children can understand some courtroom words (e.g., truth, lie, promise, remember), yet
not others (e.g., charges, allegation, defendant, jury). For younger children "charges" are
what you do with your credit card; "jury" is taken to mean jewellery like their mother
wears. Long questions are difficult for young children to understand. Unclear language
(e.g., is that not true?) is difficult for young children. Children are sometimes asked to
show skills they have not yet acquired. For example, children are asked questions that
require them to be able to count (e.g., describe someone’s height, the time of day,
distance from the crime, etc), when they can’t count. Better questions would ask the child
to answer without counting, such as "Is the person old enough to drive a car?" or "Can
you point on the wall to show me how tall the man was?"

The environment may also affect children’s testimony. Some children may be very
stressed by the courtroom atmosphere. They may experience embarrassment, fear of
having to testify in front of the accused, fear of upsetting family, fear of strangers, fear of
being yelled at. This fear, or anxiety could lead to biased answers towards or against the
defendant. For example if the child were scared of the defendant, then the child may be
more reluctant to answer questions which incriminate him or her, or merely burst out in
tears, unable to answer the simplest of questions. Equally if the child were more familiar
and friendly with the accused then they would also be less likely to incriminate the
defendant, but for the opposite reason. However each child is different to the next, and so
their own individual perceptions of the world, and memory ability would affect how
reliable their answers are to the questions asked. For example if the child were more
courageous then he or she may be more likely to point out the defendant. However this
courageousness could also take the form of stubbornness, which in turn could lead to
incrimination, where there is none. Research on the subject of children’s individual
personalities (long-term behaviour patterns) or sustainable individual moods (short-term
behaviour patterns) in relation to children’s biased or non-biased testimonies would be
helpful on the topic. The results could then be linked to ‘real’ and ‘false’ children’s
memory.
In conclusion, children’s reliability as witnesses is controversial. Many juries are
sceptical of testimony given by children under 11 years of age. The research suggests that
younger children are less reliable as witnesses, particularly if they are very young, such
as 3- and 4-year-olds. Other research suggests that young children can give accurate
testimony if the language of their questioners is clear, and if they are given appropriate
ways of demonstrating what they remember (e.g., a photo line-up). Children also give
better recall and are less open to suggestion if they have actively participated in the event
rather than acted as a bystander. Children give more accurate testimony if the questioner
is warm and supportive, and if the questions are open-ended. Efforts have also been made
to reduce the stress and formality of the courtroom environment in which children give
testimony. Children seem to be less stressed and frightened if they are able to give
testimony in a supportive situation.