Anxiety

• What is Anxiety?


  A state of physical and emotional arousal. Emotions include having worried thoughts and feelings of tension
• Anxiety can have a negative effect on recall: Weapon focus effect

  • Anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues so recall is worse
  • One approach to studying anxiety and EWT is to look at the effect of the presence of a weapon which creates anxiety
  • This leads to a focus on the weapon reducing a witness’s recall for other details of the event
• Research that anxiety has a negative effect on recall

  • Johnson and Scott made their PPs believe they were taking part in a lab study
  • While seated in a waiting room participants in the low anxiety condition heard a casual conversation in the next room and saw a man walk past them carrying a pen and with grease on his hands
  • Other participants overheard a heated argument accompanied by the sound of breaking glass and a man walked out of the room holding a knife covered in blood. This was the high-anxiety condition
• Findings on research that anxiety has a negative effect on recall

  • The participants later picked out the man from a set of 50 photos 49% who had seen the man carrying the pen were able to identify him
  • PPs who had seen the man holding the knife was 33%
  • Weapon focus effect may have occurred where witnesses focus on weapon and cannot recall events
• Anxiety can have a positive effect on recall: Fight or Flight

  • Witnessing a stressful event creates anxiety through physiological arousal within the body
  • The fight or flight response is triggered increasing alertness
  • This may improve memory for the event as we become more aware of cues in the situation
• Research that anxiety has a positive effect on recall

  • Researchers conducted a study of an actual shooting in a gun shop. The shop owner shot a thief dead. There were 21 witnesses and 13 took part in the study
  • They were interviewed 4-5 months after the incident and interviews were compared with the original police interviews at the time of the shooting
  • Accuracy was determined by the number of details reported in each account and the witnesses were also asked to rate how stressed they had felt at the time of the incident and whether they had any emotional problems since the event
• Findings on the research that anxiety has a positive effect on recall

  • The witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in the amount recalled or accuracy after five months
  • Those PPs who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate (about 88% compared to 75% for the less stressed group)
  • This suggests that anxiety does not have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of eyewitness memory in a real world context and may even enhance it
• Yerkes and Dodson's Law

  • The relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an ‘inverted U’
  • 21 studies of EWT were reviewed and noted contradictory findings on the effects of anxiety and Yerkes-Dodson Law was used to explain findings
  • When witnessing a crime we are emotionally and physiologically aroused
  • Lower levels of anxiety produce lower levels of recall accuracy and then memory becomes more accurate as the level of anxiety increases
  • There is an optimal level of anxiety and if a person experiences more arousal their recall declines
• Yerkes and Dodson's Curve


  Labelled

  
• AO3 Anxiety: Unusualness not anxiety

  • Johnson and Scott's study may not have tested anxiety
  • PPs focused on the weapon maybe because they were surprised rather than scared
  • Researcher conducted an experiment using scissors, a handgun, a wallet or a raw chicken as items in a hairdressing salon video (where scissors would be high anxiety, low unusualness)
  • Eyewitness accuracy was significantly poorer in the high unusualness conditions (chicken and handgun)
  • The weapon focus effect may be due to unusualness rather than anxiety so tells us nothing specifically about the effects of anxiety on EWT
• AO3 Anxiety: Support for negative effects

  • There were 2 groups in the low anxiety condition they saw a man walk past them carrying a pen and with grease on his hands
  • The high anxiety group overheard a heated argument accompanied by the sound of breaking glass and a man walked out of the room holding a knife covered in blood
  • From a set of 50 photos 49% recall in low anxiety and 33% in high anxiety condition
  • Weapon focus effect happened where witnesses focus on weapon and cannot recall events
• AO3 Anxiety: Support for positive effects

  • Study of 13 witnesses to an actual shooting in a shop
  • They were interviewed 4-5 months after the incident and interviews were compared with the original police interviews at the time of the shooting
  • The witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in the amount recalled or accuracy after five months
  • Those PPs who reported the highest levels of stress were the most accurate
  • This suggests that anxiety does not have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of eyewitness memory in a real world context and may even enhance it
• AO3 Anxiety: Limitation of Yerkes-Dodson Law

  • The inverted-U theory appears to be a reasonable explanation of the contradictory findings linking anxiety with both increased and decreased eyewitness recall
  • It ignores the fact that anxiety has many elements – cognitive, behavioural, emotional and physical
  • It focuses on just the physical arousal and assumes this is the only aspect linked to EWT
  • But the way we think about the stressful situation (cognitive) may also be important