• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.523-541
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• 2016

Both the child's and defendant's testimonies play crucial roles in the court's ruling of a child abuse case. Thus, empirical studies examining a child's truthful report, that is, disclosure, of his or her experience and recantation of the disclosure have manifold practical implications. The objective of the present study was to examine how easily a child recants his or her testimony after witnessing and disclosing an adult engaging in a small mistake. Furthermore, this study examined whether the child's age and emotional support from his or her caregiver predict the recantation of the child's testimony. Children of age 5-8 years played with dolls with the experimenter and witnessed the experimenter breaking the doll mask. The experimenter asked the children to keep it a secret. Then the children had the first memory interview, during which the interviewer induced the child to disclose the incident. Based on the treatment conditions, some children were provided supportive feedback while other received unsupportive feedback from their primary caregivers (mother) regarding the disclosure, then were interviewed for the second time. First, the author of this study examined whether the children would recant their disclosure (whether they would deny the incident after telling the truth of about what happened to the doll), and also examined the features of the child's voluntary reports, that is, the degree of their honesty. The findings of the experiment indicated that there were age-specific differences in the frequency of recantation, meaning that older children (8-9-year-olds) showed a stronger tendency to maintain their recantation in the second interview than relatively younger children (6-7-year-olds). Furthermore, children who received supportive responses from their mothers regarding the disclosure demonstrated more honest reports compared to those who received unsupportive responses from their mothers. The findings of this study assist the understanding of the effects of social-motivational factors on the process of children disclosing the truth when voluntarily recalling a negative incident that they had experienced and provide practical implications in legal aspects.