J. Zoe Klemfuss

University of California, Irvine | UCI ·  Department of Psychology and Social Behavior

Purpose: This longitudinal mixed-method study examined the content and qualities of parent-adolescent conversations about the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether discourse about social responsibility (i.e., care for others and health protective behaviors [HPBs]) within conversations predicted changes in adolescents' socially responsible behavior across...

Parents vary in conversational goals and style when discussing events with their children—two aspects of parent socialization that may be related, or exert opposing influence on the development of young children’s report accuracy (a critical factor in children’s eyewitness reports). In a sample of 116 parent-child dyads (Mage = 53.17 months, range:...

The extant literature on the use of autonomy support during caregiver-child conversations has focused primarily on conversations about fun, shared experiences, with limited consideration of unshared experiences or attention toward the role of conversation context. The present study examined how autonomy support, conversation context, and child age...

We examined the role of emotion- versus fact-focused conversations in the details children reported about a stressful event and whether the details provided were prompted or spontaneously offered. We also tested how these conversational strategies, in conjunction with children's emotion regulation skills, influenced children's event-related distres...

Schadenfreude and sympathy are often experienced at the intergroup level; however, little research has been conducted to examine their role in one of the most prominent and emotionally evocative intergroup contexts: the political arena. In this study, we assessed a sample of 506 Americans’ (Age M = 41.69 years, SD = 13.94; 57% women) schadenfreude...

Purpose This longitudinal investigation assessed how the frequency of parent-adolescent conversations about COVID-19, moderated by adolescents’ stress, influenced adolescents’ empathic concern and adherence to health protective behaviors (HPBs) throughout the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Participants were 181 adolescents (Mage = 15...

This study examined the experiences of law enforcement in investigating physical abuse, neglect and Abusive Head Trauma (AHT). Law enforcement ( N = 388) in the United States were surveyed regarding case characteristics, investigative strategy, interrogative approaches, frequency/content of perpetrator admissions and interagency interaction across...

This study was the first to test both the independent and additive effects of change‐detection prompts and warnings about potential discrepancies between an event and post‐event information on susceptibility to misinformation. Participants (N = 239) viewed a mock crime video, read a post‐event narrative containing misinformation, and completed a me...

Researchers have identified cultural differences in caregiver beliefs about the functions of parent–child reminiscing. However, this work has largely been limited to comparisons between Asian or Asian American and European American caregivers discussing autobiographical events, broadly. In the present study, 365 caregivers of 3- to 12-year-old chil...

This is the first study to examine the effect of questioning children about emotions and cognitions versus facts on children’s stress reactivity and regulation, as well as children’s abilities to discuss their subjective experiences, in the context of adult–child discussions about a stressful event. A total of 80 8- to 12-year-old children particip...

Caregiver-child dyads discuss unshared experiences on a daily basis. Yet, most research explores how dyads discuss shared experiences, with limited examination of how caregivers elicit information when discussing unshared experiences. The present study examined how caregivers modify their narrative style across the two conversation types, while als...

We propose that young children exhibit an order of encoding bias, such that they are inclined to report or act out events in the order in which they were originally encoded. This bias helps to explain why children assume that events they first hear described are in chronological order and why they often appear to understand “after” better than “bef...

When children testify in cases of child sexual abuse (CSA), they often provide minimal responses to attorneys’ questions. Thus, how attorneys ask questions may be particularly influential in shaping jurors’ perceptions and memory for case details. This study examined mock jurors’ perceptions after reading an excerpt of a CSA trial transcript. Parti...

Alcohol-intoxicated suspects’ confessions are admissible in U.S. courts; however, it is unknown how jurors evaluate such confessions. Study 1 assessed potential jurors’ perceptions of intoxication in interrogative contexts. Many respondents were unaware that questioning intoxicated suspects and presenting subsequent confessions in court are legal,...

Episodic thinking is involved in the representation of specific personal events occurring at a particular time and place. Although a fundamental human cognitive faculty directly associated with neurocognitive functioning, episodic thinking and its development is subject to sociocultural experiences. This study integrated experimental and longitudin...

Language style matching (LSM) offers promise as an unobtrusive measure of synchrony between members of conversational dyads, but no studies have explored key questions related to LSM in developmental context. We examined LSM in young children’s (N = 87, Mage = 54.63 months) interactions with caregivers versus experimenters, and evaluated links betw...

Confession evidence is exceptionally strong (e.g., Kassin & Neumann, 1997); thus, understanding whether juror characteristics influence their perceptions of confession evidence is crucial to legal players’ trial strategies. Several past studies have found no significant correlations between certain juror demographics/personal beliefs (e.g., race/et...

Statements made by children in a range of legal settings can irrevocably impact their family structure, relationships, and living environment. Because these statements can fundamentally alter children’s futures, efforts have been made to identify methods to enhance children’s reports by increasing comprehensiveness, completeness, and accuracy. Inte...

Confessions represent one of the most influential types of evidence, and research has shown that mock jurors often fail to dismiss unreliable confession evidence. However, recent studies suggest that jurors might believe in the false confession phenomenon more than they once did. One possible reason for this could be increased publicity regarding f...

Research on child abuse investigations focuses on Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) rather than more frequently occurring categories of abuse (Barth, Bermetz, Heim, Trelle, & Tonia, 2013). Understanding how these frequently occurring and under-studied types of investigations are conducted is crucial to conducting well-informed research with meaningful polic...

The present review is intended as an overview of our current understanding of how children’s individual characteristics, in terms of demographic, cognitive, and psycho-social variables, may influence their susceptibility to suggestion. The goals are to revisit conceptual models of the mechanisms of suggestibility, to provide an updated practical gu...

Introduction: Despite growing interest in the links between sociocontextual factors and children's behavioral functioning, few studies have investigated how such factors, in combination, relate to health outcomes or vary across mental and physical well-being. We evaluated the direct and interactive associations of parental attachment and household...

Although it is well known that exposure to misinformation after an event can alter memory, less known are the effects of being presented with different amounts of misinformation. The present study examined (a) how exposure to different amounts of misinformation affects memory, (b) how sensitively individuals monitor the accuracy of a (mis)informati...

This study examined the extent to which school-aged children’s general narrative skills provide cognitive benefits for accurate remembering, or enable good storytelling that undermines memory accuracy. European-American and Chinese-American 6-year-old boys and girls (N = 114) experienced a staged event in the laboratory, and were asked to tell a st...

We examined the links between parental elaborativeness and children’s suggestibility about a salient event, testing the hypothesis that, in an accuracy-focused context, children of elaborative parents are more resistant to false suggestions than children of less elaborative parents. Our hypothesis was supported: in a sample of 68 4–7 year-old child...

Purpose: Previous research has demonstrated that attorney question format relates to child witness' response productivity. However, little work has examined the relations between the extent to which attorneys provide temporal structure in their questions, and the effects of this structure on children's responding. The purpose of the present study...

Children are often the primary source of evidence in maltreatment cases, particularly cases of child sexual abuse, and may be asked to testify in court. Although best-practice protocols for interviewing children suggest that interviewers ask open-ended questions to elicit detailed responses from children, during in-court testimony, attorneys tend t...

Theorists have identified language as a critical contributor to children's episodic memory development, yet studies linking language and memory have had mixed results. The present study aimed to clarify the mechanisms linking language and memory and to explain the previous mixed results. Sixty-four preschool children's receptive and productive lang...

We investigated the links between questions child witnesses are asked in court, children's answers, and case outcome. Samples of acquittals and convictions were matched on child age, victim–defendant relationship, and allegation count and severity. Transcripts were coded for question types, including a previously under-examined type of potentially...

Research concerning the relations between stress and children's memory has been primarily correlational and focused on memory volume and accuracy. In the current study, we experimentally manipulated 7- and 8-year-olds' and 12- to 14-year-olds' experienced stress during a to-be-remembered event to examine the effects of stress on the content of thei...

This chapter provides a working definition of what we mean by stress and stress reactivity. It describes the functioning of three primary stress-sensitive biological systems that have important implications for children's memory, and reviews research concerning physiological arousal and memory in adults. The chapter provides a more extensive discus...

Reviews the book, Memory and Law edited by Lynn Nadel and Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong (see record 2012-17479-000 ). This book provides a timely synthesis of important issues in research and practice vis-à-vis memory and its inherent relevance in legal settings. It highlights that human memory is critical to multiple aspects of the legal system; thu...

Young children are often called as witnesses to crimes they were victims of or observed. Because of their immaturity, child witnesses are sometimes more heavily scrutinized than adult witnesses before being allowed to testify in court, for example, through competency screening. This review discusses the psychology and US law relevant to decisions a...

Reviews the book, Courtroom modifications for child witnesses: Law and science in forensic evaluations by Susan R. Hall and Bruce D. Sales (see record 2008-07355-000 ). This book fills a meaningful gap in the growing literature on children’s testimony. It weaves research on children’s testimony with that on emerging legal opinion to analyze current...

Social Context of Child Suggestibility ResearchA Case Example: Lillie and Reed v. Newcastle City Council & OrsConclusions Further ReadingReferences

The authors examined the relation between children's narrative ability, which has been identified as an important contributor to memory development, and suggestibility. Across 2 studies, a total of 112 preschool-aged children witnessed a staged event and were subsequently questioned suggestively. Results from Study 1 indicated that children's abili...

We examine eight unwarranted assumptions made by expert witnesses, forensic interviewers, and legal scholars about the reliability of children's eyewitness reports. The first four assumptions modify some central beliefs about the nature of suggestive interviews, age-related differences in resistance to suggestion, and thresholds necessary to produc...

This study examined the cerebral response to a verbal learning (VL) task in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients. Twelve OSA patients and 12 controls were studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI). As hypothesized, VL performance was similar for both groups, but OSA patients showed increased brain activation in several brain regio...