anxiety

• Define anxiety 


  a state of emotional and physical arousal that induce feelings of tension, stress and physical effects such as raised heart rates and sweatiness
• Who argues that anxiety has a negative effect on recall?

  Johnson and Scott (1976)
• Outline Johnson's procedure 


  Participants were left in a waiting room with no idea of what was about to occur, they began by hearing an argument in the next room: in the low anxiety condition, a man leaves the room carrying a pen with grease on his hand; in the high anxiety condition, a man leaves the room holding a paper knife covered in blood, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass before hand. The participants were then asked to pick out the man from a set of photos
• What were Johnson's findings?

  49% could identify the man when he was carrying a pen, whereas only 33% could identify him when he was holding a knife
• What was Johnson's conclusion

  Those who had lower anxiety levels performed better as their attention was not occupied by the threat
• Outline the tunnel theory

  it argues that a witness's attention narrows to focus on a weapon as it is the source of anxiety, reducing their recalling ability
• Who argued that anxiety had a positive effect on recall?

  Yuille and Cutshall (1986)
• Outline Yuille's procedure 


  The study was conducted on a real life shooting incident. 13 witnesses of the crime took part in the study where they were questioned on the events of the incident 4-5 months after it occurred. these were then compared with the original police interviews. they were also asked to rate how stress they were at the time of the incident on a scale of 1 to 7 and if they experienced any emotional problems post-event
• What was the real life crime that occurred?

  A shop owner shot a thief dead
• Outline Yuille's findings 


  witnesses were very accurate, those who reported themselves to be the most stressed even had the best recall: those with the highest stress level had an accuracy rating of 88%
• AO3: What makes Yuille's study more reliable?

  It has high ecological validity, making it mire generalisable to real life
• Yuille and Johnson's findings contradict one another, what is an explanation for this?

  The Yerkes-Dodson curve
• Outline the Yerkes-Dodson law

  moderate anxiety is associated with better recall than overly high or low anxiety
• Apply the Yerkes-Dodson law to Johnson's study

  Those in the waiting room were experiencing a very sudden and direct threat, meaning their anxiety levels were to high to have any positive effect on recall
• Apply the Yerkes-Dodson law to Yuille's experiment

  Those in the event of the shop owner shooting someone else was not a direct threat as the gun was not in any way directed towards them, still raising anxiety but not too much as to overwhelm them
• AO3: Who proposed that weapon focus may not be caused by anxiety?

  Pickel (1998)
• What did Pickel propose causes anxiety if not the weapon?

  the element of surprise, as shown in Johnson's study where the participants had no idea what would happen
• How did Pickle test her theory of surprise having a greater impact on recall?

  She had participants react to a thief entering a hair salon with either scissors (threatening but not surprising), a hand gun (threatening and surprising), a wallet (low threat, low surprise) or a raw chicken (low threat, high surprise)
• What were Pickel's findings

  she observed that identification was less accurate in conditions of high surprise over situations of high threat
• AO3: How do ethical issues apply to Johnson's study?

  Randomly surprising participants with this highly stressful scenario is unethical
• AO3: despite being a real life study, how does Yuille's experiment have low initial validity?

  It cannot control individual differences: extraneous variables such as post-event discussion may have impacted the individuals responses, and cases of emotional distress could be caused by other environmental factors