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Children's testimony and the emotional victim effect
University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
University of Gothenburg, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7651-9365
2013 (English)In: Legal and Criminological Psychology, ISSN 1355-3259, Vol. 20, no 2, p. 365-383Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Purpose. Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of (1) child victims’emotional expression during testimony and (2) the camera perspective used to recordthe testimony, on judgements of credibility.Methods. Law students (N = 155 in Experiment 1; N = 86 in Experiment 2) watched achild harassment complainant provide a statement in an emotional or neutral manner,presented using different camera perspectives: balanced focus (i.e., a shot portraying anequal focus on the child complainant and the interviewer) versus picture-in-picture (PiP; i.e.,a shot portraying only the child with an inset window depicting both the child and theinterviewer in the corner of the screen) in Experiment 1 and PiP versus child focus (i.e., ashot depicting only the child) in Experiment 2.Results. Although no effect was found for camera perspective, the results providesupport for an emotional victim effect (EVE); the child was perceived as more credible andtruthful when communicating the statement in an emotional (vs. neutral) manner.Moreover, the results provide corroborating evidence for the assumption that the EVErests on both cognitive (expectancy confirmation) and affective (compassion) mecha-nisms.Conclusions. These findings extend previous research by showing that the EVE and itsunderlying mechanisms apply to judgements of child complainants in the context ofnon-sexual crimes and appear to be robust against variations of camera perspectives.Legal implications are discussed.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Wiley-Blackwell , 2013. Vol. 20, no 2, p. 365-383
National Category
Applied Psychology
Research subject
Social Sciences, Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-115843DOI: 10.1111/lcrp.12036OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-115843DiVA, id: diva2:1688671
Available from: 2022-08-19 Created: 2022-08-19 Last updated: 2022-09-23Bibliographically approved

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Willén, Rebecca M.

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf