There has been increasing interest in children's ability to report accurate memories and resist false suggestions. Social and emotional factors may help us understand the mechanisms that govern children's memory and suggestibility. A socio-emotional factor that may affect children's memory and suggestibility is the quality of the attachment relationship between parent and child. In theory, children's attachment can be characterized as high in avoidance and/or high in anxiety versus low in avoidance and/or low in anxiety. Children low in avoidance and anxiety are described as securely attached. Preliminary evidence suggests that avoidantly attached children, whose bids for care have likely been rejected or belittled, display poorer memory and increased suggestibility for attachment-related information, compared with securely attached children. Because abused children are frequently insecurely attached, it follows that these children may require special interviewing techniques to ensure accurate memory and reduce the risk of suggestibility. On a practical level, this topic is particularly significant because abused children are often questioned in forensic settings. Before special interviewing techniques can be validated, basic scientific research is needed to establish if and how attachment may affect children's memory and suggestibility. To further our understanding of relations between attachment insecurity and memory/suggestibility, this project will identify the mechanisms underlying the information processing propensities of avoidant individuals. Whether the effects of attachment on memory extend to nonattachment-related information will also be examined. These issues will be investigated in 3- and 5-year-olds by examining factors that affect encoding/attention, storage/ rehearsal, and retrieval. Three experiments will be conducted. In each experiment, attachment and nonattachment stimuli will be presented and children's memory and suggestibility assessed. Children's and parents' attachment orientation will be determined. The first experiment focuses on encoding, the second on storage/rehearsal, and the third on retrieval factors. Univariate and multivariate statistical analyses will be performed. Expected outcomes include that avoidantly attached children will avert attention away from attachment-related stimuli but not nonattachment-related stimuli (Experiment 1), and that these children will avoid rehearsal of attachment-related topics (Experiment 2). To the extent that attachment-related information is encoded, avoidant children should be better able to access such information in an emotionally supportive context (Experiment 3). If avoidant children's main difficulty is at retrieval (i.e., at the time of memory report), this would have especially important implications for how children are questioned, for instance, in school and forensic contexts.
This project will have both theoretical and applied significance. This project will be among the first to examine the integration of memory development and socio-emotional development. Consequently, results from the project will advance scientific knowledge in several ways. First, this project will establish the association between attachment and children's memory and suggestibility. The project will also pinpoint the specific stages of memory affected by attachment. Finally, the investigators will determine whether the memory-attachment relationship depends on the child's age. The project is also relevant to forensic and educational practices. Specifically, the findings will shed light on forensic interview strategies, especially for children with avoidant attachment orientations (e.g., as a result of child maltreatment), to maximize memory accuracy while minimizing memory distortion. The results may reveal that forensic interviewers currently use nonoptimal strategies when interviewing insecurely attached children, and the experiments will suggest alternative routes to better insecurely attached children's memory reports. Moreover, academic learning heavily involves memory, which may be affected by attachment history. Children who have been belittled or rejected at home may suffer from difficulties performing memory tasks in certain school contexts. This research may shed light on the source of those difficulties and on the educational strategies most likely the insecurely attached child's ability to encode, store, and/or retrieve information.
