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Finkel describes how clinicians can obtain a child’s history in a developmentally appropriate, nonjudgmental interview and use it to form a balanced, defensible opinion in a suspected sexual abuse evaluation. The article explains how a consultative report should address physical findings, symptoms in relation to timing, and discrepancies between the child’s account and examination results.
Goodman-Delahunty, Cossins, and O’Brien compare expert testimony and judicial directions as ways to correct misconceptions about children in sexual abuse trials. In a mock-juror study, each of four information interventions increased participants’ knowledge, and increased knowledge related to higher credibility ratings and conviction rates in the simulated case.
Herzmann and colleagues used event-related brain potentials to examine how people encode and recognize own-race and other-race faces. Both Asian and Caucasian participants recognized own-race faces more accurately, and the neural patterns suggested that race experience affected encoding as well as recognition and later monitoring of unfamiliar faces.
Loftus, Loftus, and Messo examine weapon focus by showing participants slides of a fast-food restaurant event in which a customer either pointed a gun or handed over a check. Participants looked longer and more often at the gun, and those who saw it recalled fewer details about the event than participants who saw the check.
Lyon, Ahern, and Scurich present a Bayesian framework for assessing how diagnostic a child’s disclosure of abuse may be, with attention to the child’s age and whether the disclosure was spontaneous. They review interviewing approaches that can improve the evidentiary value of disclosures and argue that evaluations must distinguish the probability of abuse given a disclosure from related but different probabilities.
McWilliams and colleagues analyze a case in which children testified about their mother’s murder to illustrate the accuracy and suggestibility of children’s memories for a traumatic event. They describe the children’s police interviews and later testimony, considering how interview conditions and exposure to suggestion may affect what children remember and how they resist misleading information.
Olafson reviews the evidence base for child forensic interviewing and the challenges of reaching children who do not disclose, disclose only partly, or later recant. She calls for developing and testing adaptations or additional approaches for very young children, children with developmental disabilities, and interviews arising in custody or visitation disputes.
Pickel reports two experiments testing whether weapon focus is driven by an object’s threat or its unusualness, using videotaped interactions in business settings. Unusual objects impaired witnesses’ descriptions of the target, whereas threat did not, leading the author to suggest that weapons may draw attention because they are unexpected rather than threatening.
Pickel, Ross, and Truelove tested whether witnesses can prevent the weapon focus effect when they are instructed to attend to a person rather than an object. Across two experiments, instruction eliminated the weapon-related difference in memory for the target, while uninstructed witnesses gave less accurate descriptions when the target carried a weapon than a book.
This study examines why some young children make numerous false reports about an event they previously experienced. Among 61 children ages 4 to 9, performance on cognitive-control and theory-of-mind tasks predicted repeated false reports of touching, and the authors distinguish this persistent pattern from occasional memory intrusions.
