anxiety

• Rate stress


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• Rate likely to remember

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• Plot your results from your starter activity in your notes. This will be a line graph once you have plotted your values and joined them up. Put stress on the X axis and likely to remember on the Y
• Anxiety


  An unpleasant emotional state where we fear that something bad is about to happen. People often become anxious when they are in stressful situations. This anxiety tends to be accompanied with physiological arousal.
• Anxiety has a negative effect on accuracy
• Johnson & Scott


  • Focused on the weapon focus effect. The idea that a weapon in a criminal's hand distracts attention away from other key details which in turn reduces identification.
• The Weapon Effect


  1. Participants were asked to wait outside the lab and 'over heard' what they thought was a genuine exchange.

  2. Condition 1 – Heard an amicable discussion about equipment failure and then a man came out with greasy hands holding a pen.

  3. Condition 2 – Heard a hostile exchange and the sound of breaking furniture and then a man came out holding a bloody knife and covered in blood.
• People who witnessed the peaceful scene had a better recall and were more accurate in recognising than those who witnessed the hostile condition. Pen = 49% accurate recall, bloody knife = 33% accurate recall.
• The researchers believed that the anxiety caused by the weapon (blood stained knife) narrowed the focus of the participant and took some attention from the mans face.
• In contrast Christianson reported that in real life incidents involving high levels of anxiety and stress that recall can be more accurate and long lasting.
• Christianson & Hubinette


  • They conducted a survey of 110 participants who had witnessed a genuine bank robbery. Some of the people had been bystanders (someone who saw the event) and some had been directly threatened by the bank robbers. Those who had experienced the greatest anxiety (had been threatened) had a more detailed and accurate recall than bystanders.
• Yerkes – Dodson law


  Performance improves with increased arousal up to an optimal point (accuracy is poor when arousal is either too low or too high but better when arousal is moderate).
• Deffenbacher (2004) found that heightened stress has a debilitating effect on eye witness recall for adults, but not for children.
• Burns (1982) found participants who saw a violent version of a crime where a boy was shot in the face had impaired recall for events leading up to the incident. However, in a real life study Yuille and Cutshill (1986) found witnesses who had been most distressed at the time of a shooting gave the most accurate account five months later.
• Ecological validity


  The findings can be generalised to other similar situations and are therefore more likely to be relevant e.g. to eyewitness testimony in court cases.
• Demand characteristics


  Participants may show demand characteristics because they know they are in an experiment, which is less likely in real world settings.
• There are often real consequences/emotional impact in real life which do not occur in laboratory investigations.