anxiety

• anxiety is an unpleasant emotional state where we fear something bad is going to happen. people often become anxious in stressful situations. tends to be accompanied by physiological arousal (increased heart rate, shallow breathing.
• anxiety has a negative effect on memory as well as performance generally. the physiological response stops us from paying attention to important cues.
• the weapon focus effect is where violent crimes, arousal may focus the witness on more central details of the attack (e.g. weapon) than the more peripheral details (e.g. what else was going on and what the perpetrator looks like)
• Johnson and Scott (1976)

  aim: to investigate the effect of weapons (which create anxiety) on accuracy of recall

  procedure: participants thought they were taking part in a lab study, whilst waiting they overheard an argument. 2 conditions (condition one - man came into a room holding a pen. condition two - man came into a room after a heated discussion with a knife covered in blood)

  findings: condition one - 49% of participants correctly identified the man from 50 photos

  condition two - 33% of participants were accurate
• anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy. there is an alternative argument that says high anxiety/arousal creates more enduring and accurate memories
• the evolutionary argument suggests that 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 your escaped from a threatening situation.
• Deffenbacher (1983) reviewed 21 studies of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness memory

  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

  Deffenbacher concluded that the Yerkes-Dodson effect can account for this inconsistency