ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on stress, trauma, and children's memory. It considers the effects of emotion, stress, and trauma on children's eyewitness memory recollections. Despite these findings, limited research has investigated the relationship of trauma-related psychopathology, such as dissociation and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with memory performance and suggestibility in children. Studying children's memory for ecologically valid as well as stressful events to simulate a forensic event poses a moral and ethical issue. Despite certain inconsistencies in the methodological procedures and measures of stress utilized, it is tempting to conclude that the evidence from this body of literature suggests that children's memory for traumatic events is more durable than for more mundane events. Specifically, for non-traumatic events, children included more descriptions of people and objects involved in those events than in the traumatic events. For these latter events, they included more descriptions of their' and others' emotional and cognitive states during the event.
