EWT - anxiety

• Anxiety is a state of emotional or physical arousal causing feelings of worry or tension.
• negative effect -

  Suggests anxiety prevents us from paying attention to important cues so recall is worse. One big cause of this is the weapon focus effect.
• positive effect -

  Suggests the stress of witnessing a crime/accident creates anxiety, triggering the fight or flight response which improves our alertness and memory.
• weakness -

  Pps may focus on a weapon as they are surprised at what they see, rather than because they are scared. A study used scissors, handgun, wallet and a raw chicken as hand-held items in a hair salon and found performance was worse for unusual items e.g. handgun and chicken.

  Weapon focus effect may be due to unusualness rather than threat and therefore doesn’t tell use much about anxiety on EWT
• weakness -

  Real life witnesses are interviewed after the event and many things happen to them in the meantime that can’t be controlled e.g. discussion of the event.

  These extraneous variables may be responsible for the inaccuracy of recall, not anxiety
• weakness -

  Creating anxiety in pps is unethical as it may subject them to psychological harm purely for research purposes. Therefore using pps of real life crime is beneficial.

  Ethical issues don’t benefit the findings of the studies but they do raise the question of whether we should conduct the research
• weakness -

  Anxiety is difficult to measure and define as it has many elements e.g. physical, emotional, cognitive. The inverted U explanation assumes arousal alone impacts performance.

  The Yerkes-Dodson law fails to account for other factors e.g. the effect of emotional on recall