negative effects

• anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important clues to recall is worse
• a supporting study is Johnson and Scott
• in Johnson's and scotts study had participants put into two conditions
• one condition was low anxiety and they overheard a casual conversation and sees a man walk past with grease on his hands
• in the low anxiety condition 49% were able to identifiy the correct man
• the second condition was high anxiety and the participants were taken to a waiting room and overheard a heated argument and glass breaking then sees a man with a bloody knife
• in the high anxiety condition 33% were able to identify the correct man
• the tunnel theory of memory argues that people have enhanced memory for central events
• one limitation is that they may not have tested for anxiety as it is said that people focus on the weapon because they are surprised to see it
• people might have been like this due to unusualness rather than anxiety
• an experiment was done to test for unusualness and it was done in a salon and the participants saw a gun, scissors, wallet or a raw chicken. Eyewitness accuracy was a lot poorer in the chicken condition as it had low anxiety but high unusualness. This suggests that weapon focus is due to unusualness rather than anxiety and therefore tells us nothing about the effect of anxiety on eyewitnesses