Factors affecting the accuracy of EWT- Anxiety

• What is anxiety?

  An emotion charactersised by feelings of tension , worried thhoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure
• What effect does anxiety have on recall?

  - Decreases and increases recall
• Study that supports anxiety has a negative effect on recall?

  Johnson and Scotts (1976) The weapon effect

  - Naive participants were placed outside a lab , listening to conversations.

  - Condition 1: Normal conversation about equipment failure , man walks out with greasy hands

  - Condition 2: Hostile , breaking glass , furniture knocked over. Man walks out with knife covered in blood.

  - Participants were asked identify the man from 50 photographs coming out of a lab

  - It was found more participants identified a man with a pen (49%) than knife (33%)
• What is the weapon effect?

  This is where in violent crime , arousal may focus the witness on more central details of the attack (e.g weapon) than the peripheral details
• Study that supports anxiety has a positive effect on recall?

  Yuille and Cutshall

  - Real-life shooting in a gun shop in Canada. The shop owner shot thief dead. There were 21 witnesses , 13 agreed to take part in the study.

  - The witnesses were accuracy after 5 months. Those participants who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate
• Evaluation: Limitations

  Ethical considerations- some participants may have experienced psychological harm.

  Weapon focus may not be relevant-Pickel conducted an experiment using scissors to raw chicken in a hair salon.Eyewitness accuracy was poorer in the high unusualness conditions.This can suggest that weapon focus is down to unusualness rather than anxiety so isn't relevant.