Anxiety

• What is Anxiety?


  Emotional response, to stressful situations which creates a state of emotional and physical arousal (e.g. tension and increased heart rate)
• What are the 2 studies that investigated the effects of anxiety?

  • Johnson & Scott 1976
  • Yuille & Cutshall 1986
• What type of effect did Johnson and Scott investigate?


  a negative effect of anxiety
• what type of effect did Yuille & Cutshall investigate?

  a positive effect (of anxiety)
• What was the IV and DV of Johnson and Scott‘s 1976 study?


  • IV: low anxiety group or high anxiety group
  • DV: recognition of the man in the high or low anxiety group when looking at 50 photos
• What were the IV conditions in Johnson & Scott’s study?

  • condition 1: overheard a casual conversation and the participants saw a man holding a pen & grease
  • condition 2: overheard a heated argument and participants saw a man walk past with a bloody knife
• what were the findings of Johnson and Scott's study?

  • presence of the weapon reduces the accuracy to recall details of a crime = 33%
  • no weapon recall of the man was 49%
• what was the explanation of Johnson and Scott's study?


  Tunnel theory
• what is tunnel theory in Johnson and Scott's study?


  tunnel theory -> suggests that a witnesses attention is narrowed to focus on the weapon, because it is the source of anxiety~
• what was the IV and DV of Yuille and Cutshall's study?


  IV: how anxious a person was individually -> through emotional reasons and stress levels after witnessing the actual crime

  DV: accuracy of their new account against the police report from the time
• what was the procedure of Yuille and Cutshall's study?


  13 participants saw a thief get shot by the owner in a gun shop, testimonies were taken by the police

  (psychologists weren't involved in this part)
• what were the findings of study?

  witnesses were accurate in their recall of the event:

  • 88% recall in the high anxiety
  • 75% recall in the low anxiety
• conclusion of Yuille and Cutshall's study?


  • suggested that the anxiety triggered a fight-or-flight response which increases the alertness of the witnesses
  • Yerkes-Dodson Law -> suggests the relationship between anxiety and performance looks like an inverted-U on a graph to explain contradictory feelings on the effect of EWT (Deffenbacher, 1983)