Anxiety

• Weapon focus

  • Shown in the Johnson and Scott experiment
  • The anxiety of seeing a weapon diverts all focus to it and away from other aspects of the situation
  • This means that ewt is inaccurate in all aspects but the weapon (e.g they can’t give an accurate description of the persons face)
• Tunnel theory

  • Shown in the Johnson and Scott experiment
  • In stressful situations our attention narrows to focus on one aspect of the situation (as if we had tunnel vision)
  • meaning all aspects are less accurate except for the most pertinent (e.g a bloody knife)
• fight or flight

  • Shown in the Yullie and Cutshall experiment
  • A stressful event raises physiological arousal thereby preparing the body for fight or flight
  • Meaning alertness is increased, improving memory for an event because we become more aware of cues in the situation
• Inverted U theory

  • The relationship between emotional arousal and performance represents an inverted ‘u’ in which moderate stress or anxiety is associated with optimum performance while high or low levels of stress are associated with poor performance
  • Can be referred to as the Yerkes-Dodson law
• johnson and Scott

  • volunteers in a lab heard an argument in the next room and saw someone walking away with either a pen or a bloody knife
  • The low anxiety argument (pen) had a better ewt meaning anxiety has a negative effect on recall
  • Ethical issues (induced anxiety), high internal validity and medium external validity (done in a lab but could be a real life situation)
• Yullie and Cutshall

  • Witnesses of a real life shooting of 2 men (one died)
  • When asked to recall 4-5 months later their account remained the same
  • High anxiety led to accurate level of recall (anxiety has a positive effect)
  • They didn’t all choose to be interviewed again (may not be representative), used real witness comparisons (could be tested in a valid way), high external validity (real life event)
• Parker et al.

  • Interviewed people who had suffered a hurricane to see if there was correlation between recall and damage to their homes
  • Moderate levels of anxiety associated with ewt
  • Anxiety was measured by damage done to homes which may not reflect experienced anxiety, studied moderate levels rather than just high or low so its more valid, external validity is high as it was a real life situation
• Valentine and mesout

  • Visitors to a horror labyrinth were divided into low and high anxiety on basis of heart monitor and were asked to describe an individual they saw in the labrynth
  • Low anxiety associated with high accuracy of ewt meaning anxiety has a negative affect on recall
  • Quasi - experiment - no random allocation to conditions, two measures of anxiety, external validity fairly high ( real life setting but anxiety not caused By anything really threatening )
• Pickel

  • Proposed that weapon focus effected recall due to surprise rather than anxiety
  • In her study participants watched a thief enter a hairdressers carrying scissors (high threat, low surprise), handgun (high threat, high surprise), wallet (low threat, low surprise) and a chicken (low threat, high surprise)
  • Ewt was poorer in the high surprise situations suggesting not only anxiety affects recall
• Weaknesses

  • Pickel
  • Field studies lack control - post event discussions can be an extraneous variable
  • Demand characteristics - most participants will figure out the aim of the study or what is being asked of them (lacks validity)