anxiety

• negative effect of anxiety

  anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues, leads to worse recall.

  you can use the presence of a weapon to look at the effects of anxiety on EWT as a witness will focus on the weapon rather than the whole event.
• research on the negative effect on recall - procedure

  Johnson + Scott

  their participants believed they were taking part in a lab study.

  while seated in the waiting rooms there was two conditions

  -> low anxiety - participants heard a casual conversation and then saw a man walking past them carrying a pen with grease on his hands.

  -> high anxiety - overheard a heated argument, breaking glass and a man walked out of the room holding a knife covered in blood.
• research on the negative effect of recall - findings

  participants later picked out a man from a set of 50 photos

  49% who had seen the man carrying the pen were able to identify him

  33% who had seen the man holding the blood-covered knife were able to identify him.

  tunnel theory of memory argues people have enhanced memory for central events - weapon focus as a result of anxiety can have this effect
• positive effect of anxiety

  the fight or flight response is triggered which increases alertness

  this may improve memory for the event as we become more aware of cues in the situation
• research on positive effect on recall - procedure

  Yuille + Cutshall

  conducted a study of an actual shooting in a gun shop in Canada - shop owner shot a thief dead.

  13/21 witnesses took part in the study - interviewed for 4-5 months after the incident and these interviews were compared with original police interviews at the time of the shooting.

  accuracy was determined by the number of details reported and they were asked how stressed they felt at the time and if they had any emotional problems since.
• research on positive effect on recall - findings

  witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in accuracy - only slight details such as colour of items, age/height/weight estimates.

  participants who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate.

  suggests anxiety doesn't have a detrimental effect on he accuracy of EWT and may even enhance it
• Yerkes-Dodson Law

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• limitation - unusualness not anxiety

  Study on the negative effects may not have tested anxiety

  participants may have focused on the weapon because they were surprised rather than scared.

  Researcher (Pickel) conducted an experiment using handheld items in a hair salon and the most unusual (chicken + handgun) showed significantly poorer eyewitness accuracy.