Anxiety - accuracy of EWT

• anxiety: unpleasant emotional state that causes increased heart rate and rapid breathing - physiological arousal.
• yerkes-Dodson effect: arousal has a negative effect on performance (recall) when it is too high or low, however optimal performance is at moderate arousal. this creates an inverted U shape graph.
• Johnson and Scott: weapon focus effect causes a distraction of attention due to anxiety, reducing the accuracy of identification.
• J&S procedure: ppts were asked to sit in a waiting room where an argument was happening in another room. suddenly, a man would run through holding either a bloody knife (high anxiety) or a greasy pen (low anxiety). afterwards, the ppts were asked to identify the figure.
• J&S findings: 49% were able to recall the man in the pen condition, whereas the weapon focus effect caused 33% to recall his identity. the effect causes attention to be drawn to items that induce anxiety rather than other things, such as the face.
• Christianson & Hubinette argued that arousal can have the opposite effect on performance - high anxiety creates more accurate and enduring memory.
• C&H procedure: asked 58 real witnesses (bank tellers or customers) of a bank robbery to recall the event 4-15 months later.
• C&H results: all witnesses showed good recall of the event (75%) whereas the high-anxiety situation witnesses recalled the best. thus anxiety does not reduce recall accuracy.
• limitation of the weapon focus effect: there is research against the weapon focus effect being caused by anxiety. Pickel proposed that lower accuracy of recall could be due to surprise. ppts watch a thief carrying different items into hairdresser (scissors, gun, wallet, raw chicken). identification was lower in the high surprise conditions than the anxious ones.
• strength of the effect of anxiety on EWT: Christianson and Hubinette’s study was conducted in the context of a real-life event. Lab studies do not reflect the anxiety experienced from a real situation, so they are not ecologically valid.
• Fazey and Hardy suggested an alternative model called the catastrophe theory - when physiological arousal increases beyond the optimum level, there is a catastrophic decline in performance suggested by increasing mental anxiety.