Anxiety

• Anxiety is a state of emotional arousal, when there is a feeling of apprehension or encertainty.
• Findings showing the relationiship between anxiety and eyewitness testimony are inconsistent. Field experiments suggest that anxiety sharpens our memory, whilst laboratory experiments seem to suggest the opposite
• Many psychologists have proposed an 'inverted-U' relationship might exist between anxiety and accuracy of eyewitness testimony
• Loftus' Research into effect on anxiety

  • Participants sat outside a lab. They overheard either a polite discussion about equipment failure, and then saw a man with greasy hands come out holding a pen
  • Or saw a man leave with covered in blood with a knife.
  • 50% of ppts who had seen the man holding a pen could correctly identify who they had seen, compared to 33% who had seen the man with the knife
• A weakness of the relationship between anxiety and eyewitness testimony is evidence is mixed as to whether anxiety improves or lowers the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
• Studies into effects of anxiety on eyewitness testimony raise similar ethical issues to those raised by studies into misleading information. Protection from harm is an even bigger issue when studying the effects of anxiety.