Young children's use of dolls to represent themselves.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Child sexual abuse is a problem of which our society is becoming increasingly aware. Mental health and law enforcement professionals are all too frequently faced with the need to investigate allegations of abuse of a very young child. These cases are complicated by the need to interview the alleged victim, a child with limited vocabulary and verbal skills who is often the only witness.
Anatomically-detailed (AD) dolls are a recommended and widely used tool in such interviews. These dolls are especially advocated for use with very young children who are likely to have the most limitations on verbal means of self-expression. Specifically, AD dolls are regularly used as props for children to “show what happened.&rdquo.
Research on children's earliest development of pretense has been taken to support the belief that dolls would be a useful tool with children below the age of three or four years. By two years of age children show sensible doll-related pretending which reflects themes from their own lives. However, other research on early development has suggested that very young children often have difficulty with representations—even representations that are transparent to adults and older children. The requirement faced in using a doll to show what has happened in an abuse situation is quite specific—the child must take the doll as a representation of him- or herself. Do very young children have difficulty using a doll as a representation in the same way that they have trouble with, for example, a scale model as a representation of a room?.
In six studies reported here, children were asked to use the location of a sticker on one person or representation to guide their placement of a similar sticker in the corresponding location on another person or representation. This task allows for investigation of children's ability with the symbolic task faced in a clinical or forensic interview, while removing memory demands and emotional trauma. In concert with preliminary research, consistent performance demonstrated that children have a surprising level of difficulty mapping between people and dolls, but not between two dolls or two people. Additional experiments revealed that children's difficulty was due to the requirement that they reason between elements of different categories, and that the lack of categorical similarity, and not physical similarity per se seemed to be responsible. Two manipulations designed to provide support to children's reasoning, and thus potential tools for use in interviews, failed to improve the performance of very young children. Implications for practice and future directions for research are discussed.