Anxiety and EWT

• Anxiety affects our ability to encode and retrieve information.
• Anxiety makes EWT worse: The weapons-focus effect


  Weapons focus is where in violent crimes the witnesses are more likely to focus on the trigger (i.e. the weapon) and ignore peripheral things like the appearance of the perpetrator.
• The weapons-focus effect: Evidence to support

  Loftus et al monitored eyewitnesses' eye movements whilst watching a video of a crime, they found that they were more drawn to the weapon and away from other focuses. Research from Johnson and Scott supports this. They had two conditions, following a fight in another room, a man would walk out with either a bloody knife or greasy pen. Most participants correctly identified the person when they were holding a pen (49%) than when they were holding a knife (33%).
• Ethical and validity issues: Loftus, Johnson and Scott

  Ethical:

  • Ppts deceived about true nature of experiment
  • Exposed to bloody knife- could've caused extreme anxiety. Validity:
  • Lacks ecological validity.
  • Ppts may have anticipated that something would happen.
  • Real life case studies refute Loftus et al's findings.
• Pickrell's Salon research

  Issues with concluding that 'anxiety' is caused by a weapon.

  230 psychology undergraduates were shown a video in a hairdressers. Ppts were randomly allocated to 1 of 5 conditions. A man walked to the receptionist either holding nothing (control) or 1 of 4 items. The items were categorised based on unusualness and threat: Scissors, gun, wallet and a chicken. Pickrell found that the recall was worst in the condition with the chicken and the gun due to how unusual they were.
• Positive effects of anxiety: Yuille and Cutshall


  Investigated effect of anxiety in a real life shooting in Vancouver.

  21 witnesses were interviewed by police and 13 agreed to take part in the study (volunteer sample), 4-5 months later. They found that the 13 witnesses were as accurate in their testimonies 5 months later to when they first gave them. The only things that changed were estimations of height weight and age. The anxiety experienced at teh time have little effect on their memory.
• Yuille and Cutshall: issues with control


  Can't control what happened in the 4-5 months between interviews and also the volunteer sample may mean that the other 8 participants couldn't remember what had happened.
• Further evidence to support positive effects: Christianson and Hubinette


  They found that victims of genuine bank robberies were more accurate in their recall than bystanders when interviewed, despite having been more anxious; if anxiety makes recall worse, the workers should've forgotten.
• Individual differences

  Deffenbacher explains differences using the Yerkes-Dodson law. Everyone's graph is slightly different, has different peaks of accurate memory recall in relation to anxiety. It suggests that in general, moderate anxiety is associated with better recall than high or low anxiety.