Factors Affecting EWT: Anxiety

• Anxiety: What is it?


  a state of physical and emotional arousal

  That has symptoms including worried thoughts and increased heart rate

  This is a response to stressful situations e.g. taking a very important test
• Weapon Focus - Source of Anxiety


  - where a eyewitness focuses on the weapon due to its risk to individuals safety (causing high levels of anxiety

  - thus witness has a lack of focus to the appearance/features of the perpetrator

  - thus reduces the accuracy of EWT
• Yerkes-Dodson Law


  - suggests that low accuracy of recall is associated with high and low levels of arousal

  - thus the most accuracy of recall is achieved with medium levels of arousal
• Johnson and Scott: Anxiety affecting EWT


  - all ppt placed in room where they hear an argument in the adjoining room and see a man run through the room- the ppt either see man running through room with pen coated in grease- or a man run through with a knife and blood- then all asked to identify the man from photographs- 49% accuracy of identify man in pen condition- 33% accuracy of identify man in knife condition
• (+) Practical Applications


  P - Strength of RS into anxiety and effect on EWT is that it has practical applications

  E- J&S shown that anxiety can distort and reduce accuracy of the EWT. Thus this informs police during criminal investigations to be careful interviewing anxious witnesses and with crimes that include a weapon

  E- This a strength as it provides positive contributions to the criminal justice system and REAL LIFE police investigations

  L- Furthermore, it leads to positive economic implications as it leads to fewer wrongful convictions and thus less pleas and more money saved in the criminal justice system
• (+) High Control


  P - HC as LAB exp thus establish cause and effect

  E- This means researcher have high control over EV and thus have confidence that only IV (pen or knife condition) affects DV (accuracy of photo recognition)

  E- This is a strength as it means results are not affected by confounding variables and thus the researchers are more confident about the conclusion that anxiety reduces accuracy of EWT have high internal validity. Therefore supports claim that anxiety reduces curate of EWT
• (-) Y and C contradict effects of anxiety on EWT

  P- A limitation theory that anxiety reduces accuracy of EWT is that Y&C research contradicts is contradictory.

  E- They interviewed 13 people who had experienced a real life robbery in canada. They included 2 leading questions in the interview and found they had no effect on EWT accuracy. They found those who were the most anxious e.g. having nightmares were most accurate in recall of EWT.

  E- This is a limitation as it suggests that anxiety has no effect on the accuracy of EWT and thus the validity of supporting studies (J&S) is questioned. Moreover this reduces the validity of claim that A/LQ reduce accuracy of EWT.

  L - Moreover, YC have high ecological validity meaning the results can be generalised to other real life situations and thus increases external validity of findings.