factors affecting accuracy of EWT: anxiety

• anxiety has been shown to lower the accuracy of EWT
• Johnson and Scott (1979) found that witnessing a crime with a high-weapon anxiety (blood covered knife) led to a lower accuracy in identifying the perpetrator compared to a low-anxiety weapon (grease covered pen), indicating the 'weapon focus effect'
• weapon focus effect: the tendency to draw attention on the weapon used in a crime
• yuille and cutshall (1986) studied witnesses of a real shooting and found that higher stress levels were associated with greater accuracy in recall, suggesting that anxiety might enhance rather than impair eyewitness memory in real world situations
• Yerkes dodson effect: proposes that moderate levels of anxiety can optimise performance in memory recall, while extremes of anxiety, either too high or too low can reduce accuracy