Factors affecting EWT: Anxiety

• How does anxiety have a negative effect on recall?

  Johnson and Scott (weapon focus): high anxiety knife condition led to less good recall.

  Tunnel theory of memory.
• How does anxiety have a positive effect on recall?

  Yuille and Cutshall (shooting): high anxiety associated with better recall when witnessing real crime.
• How do we explain the contradictory findings?

  The Yerkes - Dodson law suggests both low and high anxiety lead to poor recall (Deffenbacher)
• Evaluation: Weapon focus may not be relevant

  Pickel (raw chicken) showed that it may be surprise and therefore tells us nothing about the effects of anxiety.
• Evaluation: Field studies lack control

  Researchers cant control what happens to witnesses between the crime and the interview.
• Evaluation: There are ethical issues

  Creating anxiety in lab studies may cause psychological harm.
• Evaluation extra: The Yerkes - Dodson law explanation is too simplistic.

  The inverted U explanation shows that performance will increase with stress, but only to a certain point, where it will then drastically decrease.