Ceci S J, Bruck M
Department of Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853.
Psychol Bull. 1993 May;113(3):403-39. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.113.3.403.
The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past century, the past 15 years have been the most active in terms of the number of published studies and novel theorizing about the causal mechanisms that underpin the observed findings. A synthesis of this research posits three "families" of factors--cognitive, social, and biological--that must be considered if one is to understand seemingly contradictory interpretations of the findings. We conclude that there are reliable age differences in suggestibility but that even very young children are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of expert witnesses.
儿童证言领域目前一片混乱，但现在似乎有可能解决这些看似棘手的争论。在这篇综述中，我们将当前的分歧置于历史背景中，并描述自20世纪初以来学者们对儿童证人的心理学和法律观点。尽管在过去的一个世纪里，人们一直对儿童的易受暗示性感兴趣，但在已发表的研究数量以及对支撑观察结果的因果机制的新颖理论化方面，过去15年是最为活跃的时期。这项研究的综合结果提出了三个“因素家族”——认知、社会和生物因素——如果想要理解对研究结果看似矛盾的解释，就必须考虑这些因素。我们得出的结论是，在易受暗示性方面存在可靠的年龄差异，但即使是非常年幼的儿童也能够回忆起许多与法医学相关的内容。我们将根据专家证人的作用来讨论这些研究结果。
