eye witness testimony - anxiety

• anxiety is a state of emotional and physical arousal and it includes worried thoughts and feelings of tension and an increased heart rate
• some think it has a negative effect on recall because it creates psychological arousal in the body which prevent us from paying attention to important cues - so recall is worse
• some think it has a positive effect on recall because it triggers the fight or flight response which increases our alertness and improves our memory for the event because we become more aware of cues in the situation
• Johnson and Scott (1976)

  • participants in a waiting area for a study were put in high anxiety situations and low anxiety situations
  • those in the low anxiety situations heard a discussion in a lab next door about equipment failure, followed by a man leaving the lab with a pen and grease on his hands
  • those in a high anxiety situation heard a heated discussion in the lab followed by a an leaving the lab with a bloody paper knife
  • later participants were asked to identify the man from their situation from a list of 50 photos
  • 49% correctly identified the man holding the pen
  • 33% correctly identified the man holding the bloodstained knife
  • this supports the idea that anxiety has a negative on EWT
• Yuille and Cutshall (1986)

  • study on a real-life shooting in a gun shop in Vancouver where the shop owner shot a thief dead
  • out of 21 witnesses, 13 agreed to take part in the study
  • the interviews happened 4-5 months after the incidents and they were compared with the police interviews at the time
  • accuracy was determined by the number of details recorded in each account and they were also asked how stressed they were at the time on a 7-point scale and if they had had any emotional problems since the event
  • they were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change after 5 months
  • those participants who reported the highest levels of stress were the most accurate
  • this supports the idea that high levels of anxiety improve EWT
• Christianson and Hubinette (1993)

  • 58 eyewtinesses of 22 real life bank robberies in Sweden were interviewed sometime after
  • some onlookers or customers in the bank (low anxiety)
  • some were employees who had been directly threatened or subjected to violence (high anxiety)
  • all witnesses showed generally good recall of details
  • those who were most anxious had the best recall
• tunnel theory (negative effects of anxiety)

  the witness' attention focuses on weapon because it is the source of anxiety which leads to the weapon focus effect where the tunnel focus negatively affect the recall of the overall event
• positive effects of anxiety

  the stress creates anxiety which puts you in fight-or-flight which increases our alertness and improves our memory for the event because we are more aware of the cues in the situation
• Yerkes-Dodson Law

  • states that performance improves with increases in arousal up to some optimal point and then declines with further increases
  • an increase in anxiety leads to an increase in psychological arousal which heightens alertness and may improve our memory because we become more aware f cues in the situation
  • however, if it gets too high, anxiety may cause you to lose focus and therefore negatively affect performance