The Research On The Development Of 4-6 Year-old Children's Suggestibility And Its Relationship With ToM

As a branch of the research of false memory, suggestibility, which refers to that memory could easily be influenced by a range of social and psychological factors, realizes a shift of our knowledge towards memory from pure theory to practical application in our daily life. Researchers believe that children, especially young children , are more suggestible than adults. Inaccurate information suggested during conversations with family and during interviews with forensic investigators can compromise the accuracy of memory reports, and legal systems have been exploring the relationship between young children's suggestibility and their abilities to provide testimonies. However, most of researches are conducted within the background of western culture, while there are very few empirical studies examining the suggestibility of Chinese children, which only focus on external (interviewing) factors. Researches have not yet emerged from the perspectives of developmental status and individual differences, though internal factors are more important for theoretical and applied purposes. On the theoretical side, they have relationship with mechanisms underlying suggestibility effects. On the applied side, knowledge of the types of children who are most prone or most resistant to suggestion would alert the court to be highly cautious in using certain interviewing techniques with children who fit the profile of 'highly suggestible.'According to foreign researches, although suggestibility levels remain high throughout the preliminary school years, age differences in children from preschool to the early period of preliminary school are more apparent. So in this thesis, 4-6 year-old children were recruited from two kindergartens and two primary schools in Shanghai. This thesis presents three studies, in which both two-phase and three-phase procedures are all employed. Study One examined the age difference in children's suggestibility during 4-6 years old, as well as whether some factors (i.e., age, gender, the type of target events to be recalled and the existence of misleading inquiry) related to children's false reports. In Study Two and Study Three, with the introduction of "False Belief in Theory of Mind that develops rapidly among the 4-6 year-olds, the interaction of some external factors and individual differences were examined to address issues of mechanisms underlying young children's suggestibility effect. Some conclusions were reached as follows:1) In two-phase procedure, children's suggestibility decreased significantly among the 4-6 year-olds, in addition to the variation in the reduction trend of the self-experienced event and of the witness event. In there-phase procedure, the age differences could not be well seen due to the reduced difficulty of the target events to be recalled. Basically, children were more suggestible in two-phase procedure than there-phase procedure.2) During the instant interview, age and other factors, including the type of target event and the existence of misleading inquiry , cast influence on the accuracy of children's memory reports, while in the recognition test, the factors cast no influence except for the misinformation effect.3) The studies of the two procedures showed the difference in the relationship of ToM and suggestibility. In the recognition test, children's suggestibility had no relationship with ToM, while in the misleading interview children's suggestibility had negative relationship with ToM, even after controlling the factors of age and memory.4) Memory performance and ToM moderated children's interrogative suggestibility in the instant interview. For children who had poorer and who had very good memory, no matter whether they passed the second-order false belief task, no relationship was found between ToM and suggestibility; for children who had modest memory, a negative relationship was found between ToM and suggestibility. The regression analysis was performed to find that ToM remained a significant predictor of suggestibility for children whose event memory was modest, after controlling for age and memory.5) Interviewer knowledge and ToM also moderated children's interrogative suggestibility in the instant interview. Specifically, children who passed the second-order false belief task should be less suggestible when misled by a knowledgeable interviewer than when misled by a naive interviewer. However, this difference was not found for children who failed the task. Although individual difference in memory ability could contribute to the interrogative suggestibility by two difference interviewers, ToM predicted the tendency to be misled more often by a knowledgeable interviewer relative to a naive interviewer, independent of age and memory when not misled.Finally, the limitations of this thesis and directions of future research were discussed.