Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

strategies, young children have greater difficulty

recalling events on their own. Also, compared with

adults’ memories, children’s memories of the original

event may be weaker and thus more vulnerable to

being altered or overwritten by the suggestions of oth-

ers. “False memory” may occur when the erroneous

suggestion is particularly strong, such as in multiple

suggestive contexts where not only misleading ques-

tions but also an accusatory context is involved.

In addition, preschoolers are less able to distinguish

between different sources of memories and thus

misattribute an interviewer’s suggestions to actual

experiences. Moreover, without understanding the

ramifications of their statements, children may adopt

suggestions to gain the adult investigator’s approval

and avoid negative reactions, perceiving pressure to

conform to the suggestions of the authority figure.

Although there is consensus that misleading ques-

tions and highly suggestive contexts are to be avoided

when interviewing children, such questioning does

not necessarily lead to false reports. For example, if

the child’s memory is strong, blatantly misleading

questioning in a highly misleading context can actu-

ally bolster resistance to misinformation, at least com-

pared with the effects of such questioning after a long

delay, when the child’s memory traces have weak-

ened. However, with such questioning, the risks of

memory contamination are potentially great, and the

child’s credibility may be destroyed in the process.

Individual Difference Factors

Although chronological age is almost always the

strongest predictor of suggestibility, with preschool

children being the most suggestible, even adults are

suggestible. Moreover, there is much variability within

age groups depending on the characteristics of the

individual. However, findings concerning individual

differences tend to be somewhat inconsistent, and the

predictive power of individual difference factors tends

not to be strong. That said, global, comprehensive

measures of language ability are sometimes associated

with preschool-age children’s suggestibility. Children

with mental retardation are more suggestible than typ-

ically developing children with normal intelligence,

although intelligence is not significantly related to

suggestibility within the normal population. Young

children with poor self-concepts or poor supportive

relationships with their parents are at risk of being

more suggestible. Children raised by secure and

supportive parents may develop positive self-concepts,

which in turn may make them resistant to suggestions

that are inconsistent with their own experiences.

Cultural factors may also play a role; in cultures where

children are trained to be especially polite or obedient

to adult authority, they may have more difficulty dis-

agreeing with adult interviewers who falsely suggest

information.

Interview Techniques and Protocols

How likely children are to disclose crimes such as child

sexual abuse when simply asked free-recall and open-

ended questions is the subject of debate. Researchers

have developed child interview techniques and stan-

dardized child interview protocols intended to increase

the likelihood of disclosure as well as the amount and

accuracy of the information obtained, while reducing

inaccuracies. These protocols (e.g., cognitive interview,

narrative elaboration) derive from the application of

mnemonic, communication, and social facilitative tech-

niques to forensic practice and can in principle be used

to interview child witnesses about a wide variety

of events; however, some protocols are specifically

designed for interviewing alleged child victims of child

sexual abuse (e.g., the National Institute of Child

Health and Human Development [NICHD] structured

interview protocol). Overall, interview protocols and

interview guidelines (e.g., the guidelines developed by

the American Professional Society on the Abuse of

Children) recommend that forensic interviewers rely as

much as possible on free-recall/open-ended prompts.

However, the use of some specific questioning is

typically also allowed. We review a subset of the

protocols/techniques next.

The cognitive interview (CI) relies on well-

established principles of encoding specificity (i.e., how

the items to be retrieved were encoded and stored deter-

mines the effectiveness of a particular retrieval cue) and

varied retrieval. According to these principles, the orig-

inal CI (developed for adults) included four mnemonic

techniques: (1) “mental reinstatement” of the external

and internal contexts of the experienced event; (2) the

“report everything” instruction; (3) the “reverse-order-

recall” instruction, which refers to recalling the event in

an alternative temporal order; and (4) the “change per-

spective” instruction, which refers to recalling the event

from an alternative perspective. Also, to avoid the com-

mon problems observed during the administration of

the CI by professionals, the revised CI includes several

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