Yerkes-Dodson: Balancing Anxiety

• What did Yerkes and Dodson do?

  Investigated the relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an inverted U

  • YERKES-DODSON LAW
• What did Deffenbacher do?

  They used the Yerkes-Dodson Law and reviewed 21 studies of EWT and made notes on contradictory findings on the effects of anxiety of the accuracy of EWT

  FINDINGS

  • When a crime is witnessed, it is likely to become emotional and physiologically aroused

  Anxiety = Emotional

  Physiological = Fight/Flight
• What happens when there is lower levels of anxiety?

  The lower levels of anxiety/arousal produced, the lower the levels of recall accuracy.

  • The memory becomes more accurate as levels of anxiety/arousal increase.
• What is the Optimum level of anxiety?

  It is equal to the max accuracy a person experiences.

  If the arousal is higher than the optimum point, recall will drastically decline.
• RESEARCH SUPPORT - Yuille and Cutshall

  They interviewed 13 people 4 months after they had witnessed a real life shooting of a shop owner shooting a thief.

  • Their recall remained high all though they had high anxiety when the event occured.

  This proving that high levels of anxiety does not really affect recall when it's when it's a real life situation.
• RESEARCH SUPPORT - Christianson and HUbinette

  They interviewed participants several months after they had witnessed a bank robbery.

  • Some of the participants were directly involved as they were workers and some were bystanders.

  Researchers assumed that the workers will have higher anxiety and they found those involved had 75% accuracy in their recall.
• Negative Effects - RESEARCH SUPPORT

  JOHNSON +SCOTT

  Participants who saw the man come out of the room holding the knife had a harder time trying to recall the face of the man as they were focusing on the knife in his hand.

  Participants who saw the man holding a pen when he came out of room had better recall of his face.
• ISSUES with INVERTED U-THEORY

  COMPLEX - CONTRADICTORY OUTCOMES

  Anxiety can improve and worsen EWT. The inverted U explanation provides a reasonable solution to this contradiction.

   

  But the inverted U explanation only focuses on the physiological arousal that is involved in anxiety. It states it's the physical changes that happen to the body and brain during stressful situations that affect the accuracy of EWT.

   

   Anxiety is however more complex than this and has many components that this theory ignores. A good example is the cognitive element to anxiety.