AO1

• Anxiety is a mental state of arousal that includes feelings of extreme concern and tension.
• Johnson and Scott demonstrated that anxiety has a negative effect on the accuracy of EWT. The high-anxiety condition overheard a heated argument in the neighbouring room, with the sound of smashing glass and a man walking through the waiting room with a bloody paper-knife, as opposed to a greasy pen in the low-anxiety condition. When asked to identify the man, participants in the high-anxiety condition experienced 16% lower rates of accurate recall, compared to the low anxiety condition.
• • The Yerkes- Dodson Law of arousal states that these conflicting results could be explained by accuracy increasing as anxiety raises eyewitness accuracy up until a point where anxiety becomes too high and more stress results in lower accuracy.
• high levels of anxiety produces poor recall of the perpetrator.