Anxiety

• Automatic skills aren’t affected by anxiety, but performance on complicated cognitive tasks such as eyewitness memory tends to be reduced
• Loftus et al monitored eyewitnesses‘ eye movements and found that the presence of a weapon caused attention to be drawn towards the weapon itself and away from other such as the persons face
• Christianson and Hubinette (1993) found better than 75% accurate recall in real witnesses to bank robberies. Witnesses who were most anxious had the best recall
• Deffenbacher (1983) reviewed studies of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness accuracy and concluded that when anxiety is only moderate then accurate is enhanced. in conditions of extreme anxiety, accuracy is reduced
• Johnson and Scott (1976) made participants hear an argument and saw a man carrying a pen covered in grease or a knife covered in blood. They were later asked to identify the man from a set of photographs
• Johnson et al found that the mean accuracy was 49% in the low anxiety pen condition, compared to 33% in the knife condition, supporting the idea of a weapon focus effect
• Deffenbacher reviewed 21 studies of the effects of anxiety on eye witness testimony memory and found that 10 of these studies had results that linked higher arousal levels to increased eye witness accuracy while 11 of them showed the opposite
• Deffenbacher suggested that the yerkes- dodson effect can account for this apparent inconsistency. According to this principle there would be occasions when anxiety is only moderate and then eye witness accuracy would be enhanced. When anxiety is too extreme then accuracy will be reduced