anxiety

• • anxiety is an unpleasant emotional state where we fear that something bad is about to happen
  • people often become anxious when they are in stressful situations
• weapons focus effect

  • this is where violent crimes, arousal may focus the witness more on central details (weapon) of the attack rather than the more peripheral details (what the perpetrator looked like)
• johnson and scott (1976) the weapon effect

  • asked ppts to sit in a waiting room where they heard an argument in an adjoining room and then saw a man run through the room carrying either a pen covered in grease (low anxiety condition) or a knife covered in blood (high anxiety condition)
  • ppts were later asked to identify the man from a set of photos
  • mean accuracy was 49% in identifying the man in the pen condition, compared with 33% in the knife condition
  • loftus believed that the anxiety caused by the weapon narrowed the focus of the participant and took some attention from the man's face
• yuille and cutshall (1986)

  aims: to record and evaluate witness accounts. to examine issues raised by lab research. to look at witness verbatim accounts. loss and distortion of memory takes place over time - the idea was to look at eyewitness interviews immediately after the event. misleading questions were incorporated into research interviews
• yuille and cutshall - continued

  participants:

  • 21 witnesses interviewed by police
  • 13 agreed to take part in the research interview (two had moved from the area, five declined and the other was the victim, who did not want to relive the trauma
• y&c - results

  • the witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in the amount or accuracy after 5 months - some details were less accurate
  • those who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate (around 88% compared to 75% for the less stresses group)
• in summary, yuille and cutshall found witnesses who had been most distressed at the time of a real life shooting gave the most accurate account five months later
• yerkes dodson law

  deffenbacher suggest this contradiction may be explained by the Yerkes-Dodson law (1908) which states that performance improves with increased arousal up to an optimal point (accuracy is poor when arousal is either too low or too high but butter when arousal is moderate)
• strengths of anxiety in EWT

  lab studies - christianson hubinette - study of anxiety in context of a real crime.

  lab studies demonstrate anxiety leads to reduced accuracy and real-life studies are associated with an even greater loss in accuracy