Factors affecting EWT: Anxiety

• Anxiety


  Has a negative effect on recall
• Procedure


  1. Johnson and Scott

  2. Led PP's to believe they were going to be in a lab study

  3. Heard an argument while waiting in room

  4. In the low anxiety condition a man walked through the area carrying a greased pen

  5. Other PP's overheard the same argument but with noises of breaking glass

  6. In the high anxiety condition a man walked out the room holding a paper knife covered in blood
• Findings


  • 49% identified man carrying pen
  • 33% identified man with bloody knife
• Tunnel theory of memory


  Argues that a witnesses attention narrows to focus on a weapon because it is a source of anxiety
• Anxiety has a positive effect on recall

  • witnessing a crime creates anxiety through physiological arousal within the body
  • fight or flight response is triggered which increases our alertness and improves our memory
• Procedure

  • Yuille and Cutshall
  • shop owner shot a thief dead
  • 21 witnesses, 13 agreed to take part in the study
  • interviews were held 4-5 months after the incident
  • compared with the original interviews at the time of the shooting
  • accuracy determined by the number of details reported in each account
  • witnesses asked to rate their stress at the incident using a 7 point scale
• Findings:

  • witnesses were very accurate in their accounts
  • very trivial changes eg colour of items
  • pp's who reported the highest stress levels were most accurate
  • 88% compared to 75% for less stressed group
• Explaining the contradictory findings

  • Yerkes and Dodson
  • the relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an inverted U
  • Deffenbacher applied the Yerkes Dodson Law to EWT
  • lower levels of anxiety produce lower levels of recall accuracy
  • memory becomes more accurate when anxiety experienced increases
  • optimal level of anxiety = maximum accuracy
  • if an EWT experiences more stress than optimum then their recall of the event suffers a drastic decline
• AO3 Weapon focus effect

  P: weapon focus may not be relevant

  E: Pickel conducted a study using scissors, a handgun, a wallet or a raw chicken as handheld items in a salon video

  E: the reason pp's focus on the weapon may be because they are surprised at what they see rather than them being scared, eyewitness accuracy was much poorer in high unusualness conditions

  L: limitation because it suggests that weapon focus effect is due to unusualness rather than anxiety/threat
• AO3 Field studies

  P: field studies sometimes lack control

  E: researchers interview real life eyewitnesses sometime after the event, Yuile and Cutshall interviews were held 4-5 months after the incident

  E: things can happen to the pp's in the meantime that the researcher has no control over, extraneous variables, effects of anxiety may be overwhelmed by these other things

  L: limitation because these extraneous variables may be responsible for accuracy of the recall