EWT anxiety

• Johnson & Scott's study on the weapon focus effect may test surprise rather than anxiety.

  The reason participants focus on the weapon may be because they are surprised at what they see rather than because they are scared.

  Pickel (1998) conducted an experiment using scissors, a handgun, a wallet, or a raw chicken as the hand-held items in a hairdressing salon video (where scissors would be low anxiety, low unusualness).

  Eyewitness accuracy was significantly poor in the high unusualness conditions (chicken & handgun).
• This suggests that the weapon focus effect is due to unusualness rather than anxiety/threat which decreases the validity of the explanation as it may tell us nothing specifically about the effects of anxiety on EWT.
• Researchers usually interview real-life eyewitnesses sometime after the event. Many factors such as post-event discussions, accounts read or seen in the media and the effects of being interviewed by the police would have happened in the meantime that the researchers would have no control over.

  This is a limitation of field research as it is possible that these extraneous variables influence the accuracy of recall.

  The effects of anxiety may be overwhelmed by these others factors and impossible to assess by the time the participants are interviewed.
• Creating anxiety in participants is potentially unethical because it may subject people to psychological harm purely for the purposes of research.

  Due to this, real-life studies are potentially more beneficial as psychologists then interview people who have already witnessed a real-life event so there is no need to create it.
• This issue does not challenge the findings from studies such as Johnson & Scott, but it does question the need for such research.

  One reason is to compare the findings with less controlled field studies to see if there is a correlation and if the findings can be relatively generalised.

  And so, the benefits of this research may outweigh the issues.
• The inverted-U is too simplistic - anxiety is very difficult to define and measure accurately.

  One reason for this is that it has many elements - cognitive, behavioural, emotional, physical.

  However, the inverted-U explanation assumes only one of these is linked to poor performance - physiological arousal.

  Therefore, anxiety might have a different effect on EWT than the one predicted by the theory (Yerkes Dodson Law).