Deborah Goldfarb

Beyond Sally's missing marble: further development in children's understanding of mind and emotion in middle childhood.

Research on the development of theory of mind (ToM), the understanding of people in relation to mental states and emotions, has been a vibrant area of cognitive development research. Because the dominant focus has been addressing when children acquire a ToM, researchers have concentrated their efforts on studying the emergence of psychological understanding during infancy and early childhood. Here, the benchmark test has been the false-belief task, the awareness that the mind can misrepresent reality. While understanding false belief is a critical milestone achieved by the age of 4 or 5, children make further advances in their knowledge about mental states and emotions during middle childhood and beyond. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of childrens sociocognitive abilities in older age groups is necessary to understand more fully the course of ToM development. The aim of this review is to outline continued development in ToM during middle childhood. In particular, we focus on childrens understanding of interpretation-that different minds can construct different interpretations of the same reality. Additionally, we consider childrens growing understanding of how mental states (thoughts, emotions, decisions) derive from personal experiences, cohere across time, and interconnect (e.g., thoughts shape emotions). We close with a discussion of the surprising paucity of studies investigating individual differences in ToM beyond age 6. Our hope is that this chapter will invigorate empirical interest in moving the pendulum toward the opposite research direction-toward exploring strengths, limitations, variability, and persistent errors in developing theories of mind across the life span.

Psychological counseling and accuracy of memory for child sexual abuse.

Tens of thousands of child sexual abuse (CSA) cases are reported to authorities annually. Although some of the child victims obtain psychological counseling or therapy, controversy exists about the potential consequences for the accuracy of victims’ memory of CSA, both in childhood and adulthood. Yet, delaying needed therapeutic intervention may have detrimental effects on the victims’ well-being and recovery. To address this controversy, this study examined whether psychological counseling during a CSA prosecution predicts accuracy or inaccuracy of long-term memory for CSA. Participants (N = 71) were CSA victims who took part in a longitudinal study of memory and legal involvement. Data regarding participants’ counseling attendance during the prosecution and details of their CSA cases were gathered throughout legal involvement and shortly thereafter (Time 1). Ten to 16 years later (Time 2), participants were questioned about a range of topics, including the alleged abuse. Time 1 counseling attendance significantly predicted more correct answers to abuse-related questions and (for corroborated cases) fewer overreporting responses at Time 2. Counseling was unrelated to underreporting responses. These results held even with other potential influences, such as abuse severity, victim–defendant relationship, posttraumatic stress disorder criteria met, testifying in the case, and delay, were statistically controlled. Although further research is needed, this study provides evidence that psychological counseling received by CSA victims during or shortly after prosecutions may improve later memory for abuse-related information.

When Your Kind Cannot Live Here: How Generic Language and Criminal Sanctions Shape Social Categorization:

Using generic language to describe groups (applying characteristics to entire categories) is ubiquitous and affects how children and adults categorize other people. Five-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults (N = 190) learned about a novel social group that separated into two factions (citizens and noncitizens). Noncitizens were described in either generic or specific language. Later, the children and adults categorized individuals in two contexts: criminal (individuals labeled as noncitizens faced jail and deportation) and noncriminal (labeling had no consequences). Language genericity influenced decision making. Participants in the specific-language condition, but not those in the generic-language condition, reduced the rate at which they identified potential noncitizens when their judgments resulted in criminal penalties compared with when their judgments had no consequences. In addition, learning about noncitizens in specific language (vs. generic language) increased the amount of matching evidence participants needed to identify potential noncitizens (preponderance standard) and decreased participants’ certainty in their judgments. Thus, generic language encourages children and adults to categorize individuals using a lower evidentiary standard regardless of negative consequences for presumed social-group membership.

Introduction to this Issue: Children's Eyewitness Memory and Testimony in Context

Increasingly, children are being called upon to participate in a variety of forensic and courtroom contexts that affect their welfare (Cashmore, 2014; Head, 2011; U.N.General Assembly, 1989). Alongside this movement, research on child witnesses and victims has burgeoned. For this special issue ofBehavioral Sciences and the Law, we invited researchers to share their expertise and contribute current studies about the role of contextual factors on children’s eyewitnessmemory and testimony, and relatedmatters. Topics cover a wide variety of issues pertaining to child witnesses and victims, including the reliability of children’s testimony, forensic interview techniques, participation in court proceedings, prospective juror-decision making, delays in prosecution, and religion-related abuse. To begin this special issue, the first five papers address topics related to children’s involvement in forensic interviews. Given the rising dependence on children’s reports in a variety of forensic and legal contexts, the need for evidence-based methods to elicit sensitive and reliable information from children is clear. Building rapport with children is one procedure that is recommended by virtually all forensic interview protocols and best-practice guidelines, including the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Protocol (Lamb, La Rooy, Malloy, & Katz, 2011), the StepWise Interview (Yuille, Hunter, Joffe, & Zaparniuk, 1993), the Memorandum of Good Practice (Davies & Westcott, 1999), the child-adapted version of the Cognitive Interview (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992; Saywitz, Geiselman, & Bornstein, 1992), and the Narrative Elaboration Technique (NET; Saywitz & Camparo, 2013), as part of a successful interview strategy to reduce children’s anxiety and increase the quality, quantity, and accuracy of their reports. In our first paper, Saywitz, Larson, Hobbs, and Wells (pp. 372–389) report on a systematic review of the research literature to evaluate whether there is a core body of experimental studies with randomized controlled trials that test the effects of rapport on the reliability of children’s reports. The paper provides insights into and identifies gaps in the current knowledge base regarding the effects of rapport-building on children’s memory accuracy and offers strategies for redefining future research agendas. Children may be exposed to postevent misinformation before an interview commences and this inaccurate information may become incorporated into their later memory reports (see, e.g., Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman & Bruck, 1994). Schaaf,