Anxiety

• anxiety has strong emtional and physical effects

  it isnt clear if this has a positive or negative effect on eye witness testimony
• negtaive effect - weapon focus

  anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention so recall is worse
• johnson and scott - weapon focus

  procedure

  participants believed they were taking part in a lab study, they sat in a waiting room

  low anxiety condition - heard causal conversation then saw a man walk past with a pen

  high anxiety condition - heard a heated argument then saw a man walk past with a blood covered knife
• Johnson and Scott - weapon focus

  findings

  participants had to identify the man they saw from 50 pictures

  low anxiety - 49% could

  high anxiety - 33% could

  tunnel theory of memory, people have enhanced memory for central events. Weapon focus as a result of anxiety can have this effect
• positive effects- fight or flight

  witnessing a stressful event creates anxiety

  this causes the fight or flight response to be triggered, which increases alertness

  this may improve memory of the event
• Yuille and cutshall - fight or flight

  procedure

  conducted study on an actual school in a gun shop in Vancouver, shop owner shot a thief dead

  13 of 21 witnesses participated

  they were interviewed 5 months after the incident and these were compared with original police interviews
• Yuille and cutshall - fight or flight

  findings

  accuracy was determined by number of details reported

  witnesses also had to rate how stressed they felt

  participants who reported being the most stressed had an 88% accuracy compared to 75% accuracy of less stressed participants

  this suggests that anxiety doesn’t have a detrimental effect on accuracy of eyewitness testimonies in real world situations and may actually enhance it
• explaining the contradictory findings

  Yerkes and dodsons law

  when we witness a crime we become emotionally and physically aroused

  lower levels of anxiety produce lower recally accuracy, memory is more accurate as anxiety increases

  however there is an optimal anxiety level which is the point of maximum accuracy, if there is more arousal then recall will suffer
• A limitation of the negative effect study is that it may not have tested anxiety

  pickel conducted an experiment using scissors, a handgun, a wallet or a chicken as the handheld items in a hairdressing salon

  Eyewitness accuracy was significantly poorer in the high unusualness conditions, chicken and handgun

  So the reason the participants focused on the weapon may have been because they were surprised at what they saw rather than scared
• A strength is the support for negative effects

  Study used an objective measure which was heart rate to divide participants into high and low anxiety groups

  In this study, anxiety clearly disrupted the participants ability to recall details about the actor in the London dungeons labyrinth

  This suggests that a high level of anxiety does have a negative effect on the immediate eyewitness recall of a stressful event
• A strength is support for positive effects

  58 witnesses of an actual bank robbery in Sweden were interviewed

  some were directly involved so experienced high anxiety, and someone indirectly involved so experienced less anxiety

  Recall was the most accurate for those directly involved

  however, they were interviewed between 4 and 15 months after the event, so the researchers had no control over what happened to the participants in the intervening time like post event discussion, so there was a lack of control over confounding variables