Anxiety - Factors affecting EWT

• What is anxiety?

  Anxiety is a state of apprehension, worry or fear -It causes intense stress at the time of the incident -This means that the eyewitness may have difficulty encoding the information during memory acquisition
• What was Johnson and Scott (1976)'s aim?

  To investigate the effect of anxiety on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony
• What was the procedure of Johnson and Scott (1976)?

  They conducted a laboratory experiment in which participants were split into two conditions and instructed to wait outside a room before the study began. In both conditions participants heard a discussion in a neighbouring room. In condition 1 a man came out holding a pen and with grease on his hands. In condition 2, the discussion was rather more heated and a man emerged holding a fake knife covered in blood. The participants were later asked to identify the man from 50 photographs.
• What did Johnson and Scott (1976) find?

  It was found that participants in condition 1 (pen and grease condition) were 49% accurate and those in condition 2 (paperknife and blood) were only 33% accurate.
• What did Johnson and Scott's (1976) findings conclude?

  It was concluded that the anxiety caused by the weapon narrowed the focus of attention making their recall less detailed and accurate which may explain why eyewitnesses sometimes have poor recall for certain violent crimes.
• Evaluation - Loftus et al (1987)

  Support for Johnson and Scott’s findings comes from Loftus et al (1987): It was found that the presence of a weapon causes eye movements to be drawn towards the weapon itself and away from other things such as the person’s face. It was concluded anxiety caused by a weapon can therefore affect the focus of attention. This is positive as it supports Johnson and Scott’s finding that anxiety caused by weapons decreases eyewitness accuracy and helps explain why this is – due to a shift in our visual attention.
• Evaluation - Protection from harm

  One criticism is that it suffers from ethical issues:

  This means that Johnson and Scott may have failed to protect their participants from harm. For example, exposing participants to a traumatic event such as seeing a man holding a knife covered in blood might have caused participants lasting harm. This is a problem as it goes against the ethical code of conduct.
• Anxiety and the Weapon focus effect

  -The presence of a gun/knife leads to decreased accuracy -Loftus argued that this is because people focus on the weapon rather than the person's face