Can Children Learn How to Resist Repeated Leading Questions and Social Pressures?

Abstract

In forensic contexts, children who are victims or witnesses of crimes are repeatedly questioned using stressful leading questions and social pressure. The main aims of the present study are to verify the effects of repeated suggestive interviews on children’s level of suggestibility and resistant responses and to study how age and intelligence quotient may reduce the vulnerability of children. The study involved 110 children aged 10–15 years who were administered the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale 2, and 6 months later, the parallel form GSS1. Older children showed a significant reduction in levels of yielding leading questions in the second administration, while the levels of a shift in answers related to negative criticism remained unchanged. In older children, the age and intelligence quotients may reduce the effect of leading questions and improve resistant responses. The results showed that younger children maintain a stable suggestive vulnerability and constant use of the same strategies to cope with cognitive and social risk factors of interrogative suggestibility, while older children could reduce their levels of yield and use more resistant responses that defer to greater source monitoring and less adherence to external expectations. Children, when exposed to repeated suggestive interviews, may learn to cope with more cognitive aspects of misleading questions while being less able to handle social–emotional pressures. In forensic practice, these results may indicate how children, depending on their age, manage the factors of suggestibility during a testimony hearing and which resistance capacities they can actually use.

Evaluating autobiographical skills and their relationship with suggestibility in children: development and validation of the Children Recalling Autobiographical Memory

“…A previous pilot study with child participants was conducted to test the cue words used ( Vagni et al, 2023 ), and a good reliability index had been obtained (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.82). The lack of or poor response to some items suggested the replacement of some terms such as “Train” was changed to “Airplane.”…”

“…Numerous studies have shown that children are more vulnerable to suggestive questions and post-event information. Children also show a tendency to provide autobiographical memories that are poorer in detail and have a faster memory decay curve ( Goodman et al, 2002 ; Loftus, 2005 ; Bauer and Larkina, 2016 ; Gudjonsson et al, 2016 ; Vagni et al, 2023 ).…”

The Role of Coping Strategies in Children’s Repeated Suggestive Interviews

“…The increase in suggestibility appears to be due to a lack of source monitoring skills. As children grow, they develop greater source monitoring skills, managing to recognize misleading information and reject the suggestive questions [25].…”

“…Several factors can intervene to protect against the effects of repeated suggestive interviews, such as age [2], higher source monitoring skills [26] resilience skills [13,27,28], and memory confidence [4,5,29]. After the age of 12, children may develop a greater ability to reject suggestive questions even in cases of repeated interviews over time, although their significant vulnerability to socioemotional pressures and negative feedback remains [2,25,30].…”

“…Several studies have examined the effect of suggestive interviews repeated over time, but only a few studies have used the repeated administration of metric and standardized scales on the same sample [25,31]. No study has verified the effect of coping strategies on interrogative suggestibility scores obtained from the administration of two parallel scales.…”