Anxiety

• Anxiety

  • A state of emotional and physical arousal.
  • The emotions include having worried thoughts and feelings of tension.
  • Physical changes include an increased heart rate and sweatiness
  • Anxiety is a normal reaction to stressful situations but can affect the accuracy and detail of EWT.
• Johnson and Scott- Anxiety

  • No weapon condition- participants overheard a conversation about equipment failure. Individual left the lab and walked past to participants holding a pen with hands covered in grease
  • Weapon condition- Participants overheard a heated exchange and the sound of breaking glass. This was followed by an individual running into the reception area holding a bloodied letter opener. Participants were asked to identify the man from a set of photos
  • Those who witnessed man holding a pen identified him 49%
  • Those who witnessed man holding letter opener 33% accuracy
• Weapon focus effect

  • Tendency for witnesses who observe an armed criminal to direct their attention towards the weapon so that they fail to encode and remember information about the perpetrator’s physical appearance as accurately as they would have if no weapon was visible.
  • This can have important consequences for the investigation of a crime, as the police often rely on witnesses descriptions of a perpetrator as they attempt to identify a suspect.
• Yuille and Cutshall- Anxiety

  • Eyewitnesses obtained from a real life shooting in Canada.
  • Shop owner shot thief dead
  • 21 witnesses who were interviewed by police, 13 agreed to take part in the study.
  • Interviews held 5 months after the incident.
  • Interviews by researchers compared to police
  • Accuracy determined by number of details recorded in each account.
  • Eyewitnesses asked how stressed they felt at the time of the incident.
  • Witnesses had remarkable accurate memories of a stressful event involving weapons.
  • Recall was found to be accurate even after a long time and 2 leading questions
• What did Yuille and Cutshall find from their study?

  • Recall was found to be accurate, even after a long time, and 2 leading questions inserted by the research time, which had no effect on recall accuracy.
  • Participants who were most stressed had an accurate recall of 88% compared to 75% for less stressed.
  • Yerkes Dodson law describes the relationship between stress and performance.
• Yerkes- Dodson law

  • Describes the relationship between stress and performance.
  • In particular it suggests that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a certain point.
  • This is also known as the inverted u model of arousal.
  • When stress gets too high or too low performance decreases.
• Real life application of research surrounding anxiety

  • Deffenbacher et al concluded from meta-analysis that anxiety levels that are too low or too high negatively affect EWT accuracy
  • Based on this understanding, when considering EWT in court, it is vital for police and legal professional to understanding that the level of anxiety determines how accurate the EWT is.
  • This research will inform the criminal justice system to take into consideration the effects of anxiety on EWT accuracy and ensure the right perpetrator is punished.
• Weapon focus effect is not relevant

  • Supported by Pickel, who conducted an experiment using scissors, handgun, raw chicken In a hairdressing salon. Results found the eyewitness accuracy was poorer in the high unusualness condition.
  • Contradicts weapon focus effect because research suggests that people focus on the weapon because they’re surprised rather than scared.
  • This weakens the explanation surrounding the effect of anxiety because it suggests that people focus on the weapon because it is unusual.
• Ethical issues

  • They were deceived and exposed to distressing stimuli.
  • For example, one way participants were deceived in Johnson and Scott’s study was they were led to believe that they were sitting in the waiting room for the experiment to begin, when in fact is was part of the actual experiment.
  • May lead to participants being psychologically harmed as they were not informed they would be exposed to distressing stimuli. In order to reduce the risk of psychological harm researchers could get more involved in real life studied.
  • Questions whether research is justified
• Lack of control in field studies

  • All sorts of things could have happened to eyewitnesses to distort their memory of the even. For example, discussions with other people after the event
  • This is a limitation because it may be that extraneous variables are responsible for the accuracy of EWT. Which makes it difficult to establish cause and effect
  • Affects internal validity of research because researchers cannot investigate the sole effect of anxiety.