Anxiety: Factors affecting EWT

• When witnessing a crime there is often a lot of anxiety involved. There is conflicting research into whether this anxiety decreases or increases the accuracy of EWT.
• Negative - Loftus (1979) had participants arrive at the university laboratory. They were told to wait outside a room ready for the study to begin. There were two conditions. In the 'anxiety' condition participants overheard a heated conversation, glass breaking and furniture being overturned. A man then left the room holding a blood stained paper knife. In the 'non anxiety' condition participants overheard a low key discussion about equipment failure and saw a man leave the room holding a pen with grease on his hands.
• Participants were then given 50 photos and asked to identify the man who had left the room. Those in the anxiety condition only recognised the man 33% of the time, whereas those in the non-anxiety condition recognised the man 49% of the time. This suggests that anxiety can lead to a decrease in EWT accuracy. Loftus believed the reason anxiety decreases the accuracy of EWT is due to 'weapon focus'. This is when eyewitness becomes transfixed on the weapon, staring at that instead of the perpetrators face meaning that the perpetrator is not remembered. This is also known as tunnel theory.
• Positive - Yuille and Cutshall (1986) examined the real life case of an attempted robbery of a gun shop in Canada. The thief entered the store and tied up the owner. The owner managed to free himself, went outside and was shot at by the thief. The owner then shot the thief with his own gun and by doing so killed him. The owner recovered from the gunshots fired at him by the thief. Yuille and Cutshall (1986) interviewed 13 of the witnesses of this crime 5 months after they had given their accounts to the police.
• Using the police interview records to assess accuracy they found that all eyewitnesses had a high level of accuracy and detail of the event. Furthermore, they found that those who reported being most anxious at the time of the shooting remembered the most (remembering around 88% accurately vs 75% for those who were less anxious). This researcher contradicts Loftus' (1979) findings, suggesting that EWT accuracy can be increased due to anxiety.
• There is research to support the view that anxiety decreased the accuracy of EWT. Mueller et al (1978) gave 96 students (half male, half female) a test of anxiety and then gave them 50 black and white photos of faces one at a time. They were then mixed randomly with 50 unseen photos and participants were shown another 50 photos during Which time they had to indicate which ones they had seen before. It was found that those participants with higher anxiety scores performed the worse supporting the link between high levels of anxiety and poor recall.
• limitation - both controlled lab studies which means the pps may not have been behaving in a way that they normally would should they have been witnesses to real life crimes. Despite the obvious practical issues (you could not ask a murderer if they wouldn't mind if your participants watched them commit the real murder), this still limits how generalisable the findings are to real life instances of crime. Yuille and Cutshall (1986) used witnesses of real crimes to investigate the effects of anxiety so the findings may be more valid here.
• Supporting evidence - anxiety can increase the accuracy of recall. Christianson and Hubinette questioned witnesses of bank robberies. Some were employees and some were customers of the bank. It is probably safe to assume that all eyewitnesses felt a great deal of anxiety at the time of the robbery. It was found that these eyewitnesses had exceptional recall (in terms of amount remembered and level of detail) of the robberies. This supports Yuille and Cutshall.
• The difference in findings can be explained by the Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908). When arousal (stress) is very high after witnessing a crime, recall accuracy appears to be low. Similarly, when arousal is very low, accuracy also appears to be low. This suggests that too much/too little anxiety can negatively affect accuracy of EWT. Instead, if anxiety levels are moderate then this appears to lead to the highest level of accuracy.
• It is possible in Yuille and Cutshall's findings that those who reported being most anxious may have been at the optimal level of arousal which lead to their accuracy being high. Those who reported being less anxious may have had a lower accuracy rating as a result of this law too. However, those in Loftus' (1979) study may have gone above this optimal level of arousal, leading to a decline in their accuracy of recall. This suggests that there is a relationship between anxiety and accuracy of EWT, it is just more complex than suggesting it needs to be high or low.