anxiety

• arousal

  a pattern of activities both physiological and cognitive that prepares us for a task
• anxiety

  a negative emotional state in which feelings of nervousness l, worry and apprehension are associated with activation or arousal of the body
• weapon focus

  the anxiety of seeing a weapon focuses all attention on the weapon and away from other aspects of the situation
• the Yerkes dodson law

  the relationship between emotional arousal and performance in which moderate stress/anxiety is associated with optimum performance while high/low levels of stress are associated with poor performance
• strength - research support

  johnson and scott
• counterpoint - real world study

  Yuile and Cutshall
• weakness - research into weapon focus may not be relevant

  pickle
• strength - real world application

  police training and courts
• johnson and scott - aim

  to investigate whether anxiety affects the accuracy of eyewitness testimony
• johnson and scott - method

  _ participants placed outside a lab listening to conversations

  _ either about equipment failure, man walks out with pen or breaking glass, man walks out with knife

  _ they had to identify the man from 50 photographs
• johnson and scott - results

  more participants identified a man with the pen (40%) than knife (33%)
• johnson and scott - conclusion

  anxiety is caused by knife, resulting in decreased focus on the man’s face and more on the weapon
• Yuile and Cutshall - aim

  to investigate the effect of anxiety in a real life shooting in which in person was killed and another person seriously wounded
• Yuile and Cutshall - method

  _ interviewed 13 witnesses months later

  _ they were accurate in their eyewitness accounts

  _ the anxiety experienced had little to no effect on their memory of the event
• Yuile and Cutshall - results

  suggest that Johnson and Scott results do not represent real cases of extreme anxiety
• Pickle - aim

  to investigate the effect of weapon focus
• Pickel - method

  used scissors, a gun, a wallet or raw chicken as handheld items in a hairdressing video
• Pickle - results

  eyewitness accuracy was significantly poorer in the high unusualness conditions (chicken and gun)
• Pickle - conclusion

  that weapon focus is due to unusualness rather than anxiety or threat