Anxiety A03

• What is weakness (some people cope better with anxiety than others)

  -Bothwell et al (1987) investigated the difference in accuracy between people who are very anxious (neurotics) and more emotionally sensitive people (stable).

  -They found that neurotics become less accurate when stressed, whereas emotionally-stable individuals become more accurate.

  -It is possible that the results from these people average each other out in many studies.
• A weakness is that the weapon focus effect may be due to surprise rather than anxiety Pickel (1998) investigated

  -She arranged ppts to watch a thief entering a hair salon carrying an object.

  -There were 4 conditions
• What were the 4 conditions

  -thief carried a pair of scissors (high threat, low surprise)​

  -thief carried a handgun (high threat, high surprise)

  -thief carried a wallet (low threat, low surprise)

  -thief carried a whole raw chicken (low threat, high surprise)
• It was found that

  identification was least accurate in high surprise conditions. This supports the idea that weapon effect is related to surprise, rather than anxiety
• A strength is that Loftus et al (1987) showed that anxiety does focus attention on central features of a crime, such as a weapon.

  -The researchers monitored eyewitnesses’ eye movements and found that the presence of a weapon caused attention to be physically drawn towards the weapon itself and away from other things like a person’s face.
• Weakness: While the Yerkes-Dodson Law provides a useful explanation for why findings on anxiety and memory conflict,

  -critics argue that anxiety is a complex emotion involving cognitive, behavioural, and physiological components, and simply measuring arousal may not capture the full picture.

  -This means that using a simple model may not fully explain the relationship between anxiety and memory accuracy.
• Another strength is that research into anxiety and EWT is the uses real-life studies, which have high ecological validity.

  -For example, Christianson and Hubinette studied actual victims of armed robbery, making their findings more relevant to real-world crimes.

  -This suggests that anxiety does not always reduce accuracy and can sometimes enhance memory in real situations.