anxiety

Cards (4)

  • Research into anxiety often breaks ethical guidelines. Methods to induce anxiety (like showing violent films like in Loftus and Burns' experiment) may cause harm
  • Natural exp [Christianson and Hubinette] - found emotional arousal enhances accuracy of memory. Questioned 110 real witnesses to 22 real life robberies. Found witnesses threated directly had more accurate recall of details than those who were onlookers and less emotionally aroused.
  • Loftus used Standardised procedure (e.g. same video for all participants) and had high Control over EV (ensuring no other distractions)ensuring her was methodology easy to replicate.
    This is a strength as researchers can replicate study to see if results are consistent. In fact, Loftus conducted a large number of studies into EWT, often replicating method with some tweaks finding the same outcome (that a state of high anxiety negatively affects EWT).
  • Loftus used a video of a simulated robbery - as difficult to reproduce genuine EWT incidents due to ethical reasons