anxiety

• anxiety


  increased mental state of arousal
• in other studies due to them being lab studies they may lack validity as no participant is anxious
• anxiety decreases recall


  high levels of anxiety produces reduced recall of criminals face
• weapon focus


  witnesses get distracted, focusing on weapon rather than criminal
• high levels of anxiety increase recall

  a state of arousal improves alertness and awareness of the situations and surroundings - also strong emotions felt could improve memories
• Yurks Dodsons law of arousal

  low anxiety - low accuracy

  anxiety rises - witness becomes alert

  anxiety becomes too high - more stress/distraction results in lower accuracy
• Anxiety - EWT


  naive participants placed outside of room

  1. normal convo about equipment failure - man walks out with ink
  2. hostile argument, breaking furniture - man walks out with knife with blood
  3. 50 photos shown more participants identified man with pen 50% than with knife 30% - weapon focus
• field study shown


  deadly shooting - four months after the event

  found - patients resisted misleading questions and those with most stress had the most accurate EWT

  • misleading info and anxiety mat not be significant for real world EWT