PSYCHOLOGY

Dr. Livia L. Gilstrap joined UCCS from Cornell University where she earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in May 2002. She earned her B.A. in 1995 from Western Washington University. Dr. Gilstrap teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Developmental Psychology.

Children's memory and eyewitness testimony are Dr. Gilstrap's primary areas of research. Her program of research is focused on children's abilities to recall past events in the context of conversations with adults, an area of children's autobiographical memory development. Like many researchers in the area of psychology and law, aspects of Dr. Gilstrap's work cut across traditional domains of cognitive and social psychology as well as including both experimental and observational methods. Dr. Gilstrap is currently working on projects concerning children's memory, children's communication skills, and adults' scaffolding of children's recall and her interests include normative recall contexts (parent-child conversations) as well as children's recall in legal contexts (forensic interviews).

Research areas: Developmental Psychology; Autobiographical Memory; Dyadic Interaction; Developmental and Observational Methods; Psychology and the Law

Curriculum Vita (updated 2/2006 - .pdf file)

Representative publications:

Melinder, A., & Gilstrap, L. L. (in press). The relationships between child and forensic interviewer behaviors and individual differences in interviews about a medical examination. European Journal of Developmental Psychology.

Gilstrap, L. L., & McHenry, M. P. (2006). Using experts to aid jurors in assessing child witness credibility. The Colorado Lawyer, 35, 65-74.

Gilstrap, L. L. (2005-2006, Fall/Winter). Experts in child abuse cases: Diagnosing abuse, post-diction and the state of the scientific community. The Rap Sheet, 9-11.

Gilstrap, L. L., & Ceci, S. J. (2005). Reconceptualizing children's suggestibility: Bidirectional and temporal properties. Child Development, 76(1), 40-53.

Gilstrap, L. L., Fritz, K., Torres, A., & Melinder, A. (2005). Child witnesses: Common ground and controversies in the scientific community. William Mitchell Law Review, 32(1), 59-79.

Gilstrap, L. L., & Greene, E. (2005). Courtroom testimony. In N. J. Salkind (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Development (pp. x). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Gilstrap, L. L. (2004). A missing link in suggestibility research: What is known about the behavior of field interviewers in unstructured interviews with young children? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 10, 13-24.

Gilstrap, L. L., & Papierno, P. B. (2004). Is the cart pushing the horse? The effects of child characteristics on children's and adults' interview behaviors. Applied Cognitive Psychology; Special edition: Individual and developmental differences in suggestibility, 18(8), 1059-1078.

Hyman, I. E., Jr., Gilstrap, L. L., Decker, K., & Wilkinson, C. (1998). Manipulating judgments of whether an event is remembered: The role of reality monitoring in false memory acceptance. Applied Cognitive Psychology; Special edition: Autobiographical memories, 12, 371-386.