Verbal ability, self‐control, and close relationships with parents protect children against misleading suggestions

Abstract

Suggestibility to misleading questions about events that occurred in a laboratory playroom visit 9 months earlier was assessed in 70 5-year-old children (54% boys). Six measures of children's suggestibility were coded from videotaped and transcribed interviews: agreement with false suggestions that the research assistant had undressed them, hit them, hurt them, touched them on the bottom, and done bad things, and a overall rating of suggestibility. These measures of suggestibility were related to characteristics of the child and family that had been collected over the course of a longitudinal study beginning when the children were 1 month of age. Children who had more advanced verbal abilities, adaptive inhibitory control, and close and secure relationships with supportive and psychological healthy parents were better able to resist the interviewer's suggestive questions and persuasive attempts.

Low‐SES Preschool Children's Eyewitness Memory: The Role of Narrative Skill

“…Children who made higher‐quality story narratives recounted more correct information in free recall and were more accurate in answering direct questions, producing a higher proportion of correct answers and a lower proportion of commission errors. Counter to our prediction, the quality of children's story narratives did not offer any independent contributions to their memory, which is not consistent with the previous findings showing that children's general narrative abilities were related to greater suggestibility for a single, specific event they were asked about (Clarke‐Stewart et al, ; Kulkofsky & Klemfuss, ). Past results on general narrative abilities and suggestibility imply that children who generally produce better stories may desire to integrate an interviewer's false suggestions with their own statements and are likely to change their responses.…”

What the stories children tell can tell about their memory: Narrative skill and young children's suggestibility.

“…In contrast, the findings that children's general narrative ability, measured in the autobiographical narrative, is associated with in-creased suggestibility are consistent with previous research results ( Clarke-Stewart et al, 2004). Given that narrative skill appears to develop through conversations with caregivers and other adults (Fivush, Reese, & Haden, 2006;Hudson, 1990;Reese & Farrant, 2003), this finding may reflect a tendency by children with more advanced narrative ability to treat memory sharing as a socially mediated activity, whereby both partners are actively involved in constructing a story of past events.…”

“…It should be noted that, although influenced by children's general linguistic and narrative skills, it is the production of the narrative about the specific event that appears to be a negative predictor of suggestibility. These findings mirror other work showing that children's general memory abilities do not predict suggestibility (Bruck & Melnyk, 2004; Clarke-Stewart et al, 2004; Eisen, Goodman, Qin, & Davis, 2002).…”

Suggestibility, social support, and memory for a novel experience in young children

“…The lack of age effects likely reflects the restricted age in our sample. However, consistent with prior research (e.g., Clarke-Stewart et al, 2004;Roebers & Schneider, 2004), linguistic ability predicted better memory independent of age. Verbally advanced children may have better understood the questions, facilitating their ability to provide correct responses.…”