factors affecting EWT- anxiety

• Tunnel theory- during a stressful event, we automatically narrow attention to the details that are the source of arousal. Narrowed attention, combined with heightened processing of critical details result in poorer memory of peripheral details. An example of the tunnel theory is the weapon focus effect.
• Anxiety may have a negative effect on recall as it creates psychological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues, so recall is worse.
• Johnson and Scott

  Pps were sorted in 2 conditions where experimenters would cause either high or low anxiety. Both groups sat in a waiting room where they heard a heated argument in the room next door. In the low anxiety condition, a man left the room with grease and a pen in his hands whereas in the high anxiety a man walked out with a mock paper knife covered in blood.

  When picking out the man from a set of photos, pps were more successful in the low anxiety condition showing the affect of anxiety and tunnel theory/weapon focus.
• London dungeon study

  Pps were sent through the London horror labyrinth wearing heart monitors. Afterwards, the pps were given the task to describe the actor they encountered in the labyrinth. They found that the pps who suffered the most anxiety (movements, jumpscares etc.) found it hardest to recall correct details about the actor and made more mistakes than those pps who experienced low anxiety.
• Anxiety can be though to have a positive effect on recall as being in an anxiety inducing situation creates psychological arousal within the body as it triggers the fight or flight response that increases our alertness and improves our memory of the event because of being more aware of cues in the situation.
• Yuille and Cutshall

  Conducted a study after a real shooting that took place in a gun shop in Canada. The shop owner shot a thief dead in front of 21 witnesses- 13 became pps. They were interviewed 5 months after the incident which was compared with real police interviews.

  it was found that accounts were as accurate as it was 5 months prior. pps who reported higher levels of stress during the incident had slightly higher accurate recall than those who were less stressed.
• Explaining contradictory findings

  According to Yerkes and Dodson the relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an 'inverted u'. Applied to EWT, the law says that the lower the anxiety produced, the lower levels of accurate recall. The accuracy becomes more accurate with the higher anxiety, however only to a certain extent where it starts to decline after the point of optimal anxiety/maximum accuracy
• a weakness is that there is other research that shows the weapon focus may test surprise rather than anxiety. people often focus on sometimes because they are surprised to see it/an unnatural object rather than because they are scared. finings showed the effect being stronger when pps saw a chicken rather than scissors when though they are the bigger threat. this suggests that the weapon focus doesn't tell us anything about the affects of anxiety on EWT.
• another weakness is that field studies sometimes lack control. as the researchers usually interview real life eyewitnesses sometime after the event has happened, many things can have happened to the pps in the passed time such that researchers have no control over things such as post-event discussion. this is a limitation as it is possible that the extraneous variables may be responsible or involved in the accuracy of recall, therefore potentially making the findings of the studies unreliable.
• there are ethical issues within the studies used as causing pps anxiety can be seen as unethical as it may put pps subject to psychological harm purely for the purpose of research. this is why real-life/natural studies can be good for anxiety research as the pps have already witnesses the event and the researcher shouldn't be causing them further new trauma.
• a criticism is that the inverted-u explanation is too simple, anxiety is very difficult to define and measure accurately. one reason for this is that anxiety has many elements such as cognitive, behavioural, emotional, physical etc., and the inverted-u explanation assumes that poor performance is only linked to one of these elements- physical arousal.