Eyewitness testimony- anxiety

• Anxiety

  has strong emotional and physical effects, reaction to stressful situations, but can affect accuracy and detail of EWT.
• Negative effect on recall (weapon focus)

  anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body- prevents us paying attention to important cues, so recall is worse.

  • You can look at the effects of the presence of a weapon, which creates anxiety on EWT.
  • leads to a focus on the weapon, reducing recall for other details.
• Weapon focus- research

  Johnson+Scott.- participants in waiting room for a 'lab study'=fake

  • participants in low-anxiety condition heard a casual conversation in next room+ saw a man walk past carrying a pen with grease on hands.
  • other participants in high-anxiety condition heard an argument+ heard broken glass, the saw a man walk out holding a knife covered in blood.
  • Findings: 49% in low-anxiety condition could identify the man. 33% in high-anxiety condition could identify the man.
  • tunnel theory= people have enhanced memory for central events, weapons focus is as a result of anxiety.
• positive effect on recall

  witnessing a stressful event cause anxiety, which triggers the fight of flight response, increasing alertness- may improve memory as we become more aware of cues.
• Yuille+ cutshall


  Study of an actual shooting in a gun shop - shop owner shot dead a thief
• Witness interviews

  1. Conducted at the time

  2. Conducted 5 months afterwards
• Witness interviews

  • Accuracy recorded by number of details remembered
  • How stressed witnesses felt
  • Any emotional problems since event
• Anxiety-positive effects research

  • Does not have a detrimental effect on accuracy of eyewitness memory in real-life world context
  • May enhance it
• explaining contradictory findings

  Yerks+ Dodson= performance will increase with stress, but only to a certain point when it decreases.

  • when we witness a crime we become emotionally and physiologically aroused- experience anxiety and fight or flight response.
  • lower anxiety levels produce lower anxiety levels of recall accuracy, memory becomes more accurate when anxiety increases.
• Evaluation- unusualness not anxiety

  limitation of johnson+ scott study= may not have tested anxiety.

  reason participants focused on weapon- may have been surprised at what they saw rather than being scared.

  -Pickel conducted an experiment using scissors, handgun, wallet, raw chicken as hand held items in a hairdressers video. (Scissors=high anxiety, low unusualness) Ew accuracy poorer in high unusualness conditions(chicken+ handgun)

  • Suggests weapon focus effect is due to unusualness rather than threat so doesn't tell us effects of anxiety on EWT.
• support for negative effects

  Valentine+ Mesout supports weapons focus, finding negative effects on recall.- used an objective measure(heart rate) to divide participants into high and low anxiety groups- anxiety clearly disrupted participants ability to recall details about actor in london dungeon.

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

  Christianson+ Hubinette witnesses to actual bank robberies (some directly and indirectly involved)

  • assumed those directly involved would experience most anxiety.
  • found recall was more than 75% accurate across all witnesses.
  • direct victims= more accurate
  • finding from actual crimes confirm that anxiety doesn't reduce the accuracy of recall for eyewitnesses and may even enhance it.
• Evaluation- counterpoint

  Christianson+ Hubinette interviewed their participants several months after the event- no control over what happened to participants in interviewing time.(eg- post event discussion)

  • effects of anxiety may have been overwhelmed by other factors and impossible to assess by the time participants were interviewed.
  • so it's possible that a lack of control over confounding variables may be responsible for these findings.