accuracy of EWT: anxiety

• stress and anxiety has a negative effect on memory as well as performance generally
• automatic skills are not affected by stress/physiological arousal but performance on complicated cognitive tasks is reduced by stress
• Johnson + Scott (1976): a difference account of why anxiety might reduce the accuracy of EWT is the weapon focus effect (the view that a weapon in a criminal's hand distracts attention - due to the anxiety is creates) from other features and therefore reduced the accuracy of identification
• Johnson + Scott (1976): to test this effect Johnson and Scott asked participants to sit in a waiting room where they heard an argument in an adjoining room and then saw a man run through the room carrying either a pen covered in grease (low anxiety condition) or a knife covered in blood (high anxiety condition) - weapon focus' condition
• Johnson + Scott (1976): participants were later asked to identify the man from a set of photographs
• Johnson + Scott (1976): the findings supported the idea of the weapon focus effect
• Johnson + Scott (1976): mean accuracy was 49% in identifying the man in the pen condition, compared w/ 33% accuracy in the knife condition
• Johnson + Scott (1976): Loftus et al (1987) showed that anxiety does focus attention on central features of a crime e.g. the weapon
• Johnson + Scott (1976): the researchers monitored eyewitness' eye movement and found that the presence of a weapon caused attention to be physically drawn towards the weapon itself and away from other things such as the persons face
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: there is an alternative argument that says high anxiety/arousal creates more enduring and accurate memories
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: e.g. there is an evolutionary argument that suggests it would be adaptive to remember events that are emotionally important so that you could identify similar situations in the future and recall how to respond such as what you did last time when you escaped from a lion
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: Christianson + Hubinette found evidence of enhanced recall when they questioned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies in Sweden
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: the witnesses were either victims (bank teller) or bystanders (employee or customer) i.e. high and low anxiety respectively
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: the interviews were conducted 4-15 months after the robberies
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: the researchers found that all witnesses showed generally good memories for details of the robbery itself (better than 75% accurate recall)
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: those witnesses who were most anxious (the victims) had the best recall of all
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: this study generally shows that anxiety does not reduce accuracy of recall
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy: Christianson in a review of research concluded that memory for negative emotional events is better than for neutral event, at least for the central details
• resolving the contradiction: Kenneth Deffenbacher reviewed 21 studies of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness memory
• resolving the contradiction: he found that 10 of these studies had results that linked higher arousal levels to increased eyewitness accuracy while 11 of them showed the opposite
• resolving the contradiction: Deffenbacher suggested that Yerkes-Dodson effect can account for this apparent inconsistency
• resolving the contradiction: according to this principle there would be occasions when anxiety/arousal is only moderate and then eyewitness accuracy would be enhanced
• resolving the contradiction: when anxiety/arousal is too extreme then accuracy will be reduced
• evaluation L: a criticism of the weapon focus effect comes from Pickel (1998) who proposed that the reduced accuracy of identification could be due to surprise rather than anxiety
• evaluation S: these types of research has added to our understanding of what happens to real-life witnesses and had increased real-life witnesses and has increased their credibility in court even if they were scared at the time
• evaluation S: real-life studies are higher in ecological validity
• evaluation L: Fazey + Hardy (1988) suggested a more complex relationship between anxiety and performance than Yerkes-Dodson model = suggesting an alternative model one that Deffenbacher et al believe fits better w/ research findings, especially those of real-life eyewitness