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 produce tainted reports. The fifth unwarranted assumption involves the influence of both individual and interviewer factors in determining children's suggestibility. The sixth unwarranted assumption concerns the claim that suggested reports are detectable. The seventh unwarranted assumption concerns new findings about how children deny, disclose, and/or recant their abuse. Finally, we examine unwarranted statements about the value of science to the forensic arena. It is important not only for researchers but also expert witnesses and court-appointed psychologists to be aware of these unwarranted assumptions.

This study is the first to create and use spontaneous (i.e., unrehearsed) pro-social lies in an ecological setting. Creation of the stimuli involved 51 older adult and 44 college student “senders” who lied “authentically” in that their lies were spontaneous in the service of protecting a research assistant. In the main study, 77 older adult and 84 college raters attempted to detect lies in the older adult and college senders in three modalities: audio, visual, and audiovisual. Raters of both age groups were best at detecting lies in the audiovisual and worst in the visual modalities. Overall, college students were better detectors than older adults. There was an age-matching effect for college students but not for older adults. Older adult males were the hardest to detect. The older the adult was the worse the ability to detect deception.

In experiment 1, 267 undergraduates read a case summary and witness statement. Sex and age of the witness (49, 69, 79 or 89 years) were varied. Participants rated the witness's perceived convincingness, confidence, quality of observation, accuracy, honesty, competence, memory, suggestibility, and cognitive functioning. As well as an age effect for honesty, age by sex interactions were observed for several characteristics, particularly for comparisons of the 79-year-olds versus the 49-year-olds, and 89-year-olds versus the 49-year-olds. In experiment 2, 94 undergraduates read the same testimony given by a 79-year-old male or female witness, and completed the Fraboni Scale of Ageism and the Aging Semantic Differential. Participants who evidenced stronger aging stereotypes on these measures rated the witness less favorably than did participants who were less prejudiced. This experiment is the first to show a link between perceived credibility of older adults and ageist attitudes. Practical applications regarding how older witnesses are viewed by jurors, and the criminal justice system more generally, are discussed.

This article presents recommendations from expert practitioners and researchers regarding future directions for research on elder abuse prevention. Using the Research-to-Practice Consensus Workshop model, participants critiqued academic research on the prevention of elder mistreatment and identified practice-based suggestions for a research agenda on this topic. The practitioners’ critique resulted in 10 key recommendations for future research that include the following priority areas: defining elder abuse, providing researchers with access to victims and abusers, determining the best approaches in treating abusers, exploiting existing data sets, identifying risk factors, understanding the impact of cultural factors, improving program evaluation, establishing how cognitive impairment affects legal investigations, promoting studies of financial and medical forensics, and improving professional reporting and training. It is hoped that these recommendations will help guide future research in such a way as to make it more applicable to community practice.