Evaluation

• Unusualness not anxiety


  One limitation of Johnson and Scott's study on weapon focus is that it may not have actually measured anxiety:

  • Participants may have been surprised rather than scared
  • Kerri Pickel (1998) - scissors, a wallet, a gun and a raw chicken as the hand-held item in a hairdressing salon video (where scissors would be high anxiety, low unusualness)
  • Eyewitness accuracy was significantly lower in the high unusualness category (gun and chicken)
  • This suggests that the weapon focus effect is due to unsualness rather than anxiety
• Support for negative effects

  One strength is evidence supporting the view that anxiety has a negative effect on the accuracy of recall:

  • Tim Valentine Jan Mesout (2009) supports the research on weapon focus, finding negative effects on recall.
  • The researchers used an objective measure - heart rate - to divide participants into high and low-anxiety
  • Anxiety clearly disrupted the participants' ability to recall details about the actor in the Labyrinth
  • This suggests that a level of anxiety does have a negative effect on the immediate eyewitness recall of a stressful event
• Support for positive effects


  A strength is evidence showing that anxiety can have positive effects on recall:

  • Sven-Ake Christianson and Birigitta Hubinette (1993) interviewed 53 witnesses to a bank robbery in Sweden. Some were directly involved and some were indirectly involved
  • The researchers assumed that those directly involved would experience the most anxiety
  • Recall was more than 75% across all witnesses. The direct victims were even more accurate
  • These findings from actual crimes confirm that anxiety does not reduce the accuracy of recall of eyewitness recall
• Counterpoint to support for positive effects


  Christianson and Hubinette interviewed their participants several months after the event (4-15). The researchers therefore had no control over what happened to the participants in the intervening time. The effects of anxiety may have been overwhelmed by these other factors and impossible to asses by the time they were interviewed. Therefore it is possible that a lack of control over confounding variables may be responsible for these findings, invalidating their findings.