This volume grew out of a 1985 American Psychological Association symposium that was devoted to the issue of children's eyewitness testimony. The symposium itself was organized in response to a growing concern among professionals over the limited state of knowledge about the reliability and validity of children's eye­ witness and earwitness memory and jurors' implicit beliefs about this. Increas­ ingly, the courts are calling upon young children to provide testimony in an ever-widening range of cases, including capital offenses. As state after state aban­ dons its rules requiring children's testimony to be corroborated by a third party, the need to learn more about factors that might influence the accuracy of chil­ dren's recollections becomes increasingly acute. This volume comprises a collection of chapters that lie at the crossroads of psy­ chology and criminal justice. All of the chapters deal with children's recollec­ tions, at least in some fashion. Some authors have described research involving children's recollections under emotionally neutral circumstances (e.g., Ceci, Ross, and Toglia; King and Yuille; Zaragoza); others have made the most of naturally occurring stressful situations, such as trips to the dentist's office or to the hospital to have blood work done (Peters; Goodman, Aman, and Hirschman).

Inhaltsangabe1. Child Sexual and Physical Abuse: Children's Testimony.- 2. Suggestibility and the Child Witness.- 3. Children's Testimony: Age-Related Patterns of Memory Errors.- 4. Memory, Suggestibility, and Eyewitness Testimony in Children and Adults.- 5. Age Differences in Suggestibility: Narrowing the Uncertainties.- 6. Reality Monitoring and Suggestibility: Children's Ability to Discriminate Among Memories From Different Sources.- 7. The Impact of Naturally Occurring Stress on Children's Memory.- 8. The Child in the Eyes of the Jury: Assessing Mock Jurors' Perceptions of the Child Witness.- 9. Children on the Witness Stand: A Communication/Persuasion Analysis of Jurors' Reactions to Child Witnesses.- 10. The Memory of Children.- 11. Getting Out of a Rut: Detours to Less Traveled Paths in Child-Witness Research.- 12. Setting the Stage for Psychological Research on the Child Eyewitness.- Author Index.