Anxiety

• Anxiety has a negative effect: Johnson & Scott

  • Participants thought they were going to take part in a laboratory study, they were asked to sit in a waiting room.
  • Participants were placed in either high anxiety/low anxiety
  • Conditon 1 - Low anxiety: Participants heard an argument taking place in the next room. (Raised voices). Then saw a man walk into the waiting room, carrying a pen and grease on his hands.
  • Condition 2 - Participants heard the same thing, however the man came out with shard of broken glass.
• Johnson & Scott found that 49% of participants with low anxiety correctly recalled the man, compared to 33% of the man from the high anxiety condition.
• Anxiety has a positive effect recall: Yulie & Cutshall

  • Witnessing a stressful event creates anxiety through physiological arousal, the fight or flight response is triggered increasing alertness.
  • Conducted a study of a shooting in Vancouver, Canada.
  • The shop owner shot the thief dead, 21 witnesses, 13 rook [part in the study.
  • They were interviewed four-five months after the incident and these interviews were compared with the original police interviews at the time of the shooting.
  • Witnesses were asked to rate how stressed they felt at the time of the incident on a 7 point scale.
• Yulie and Cutshall found that witnesses were very accurate In their accounts and there was little change in the amount recalled or accuracy after five months.

  • Participants who recorded the highest levels of stress - 88% compared to 75% for the less stressed group.
• Inverted 'U' Theory:

  Yerkes and Dodson argue that extremely high levels of anxiety would produce low recall and extremely low levels of anxiety will produce low recall but medium levels of anxiety produce high levels of recall.
• A strength of the research is that it is conducted in real-life settings. Criag Johnson & Willam Scott's study took place in actually started. In addition, the task of recalling is realistic. This suggests that the research has high ecological validity.
• Had practical application of the research. For example, if we know that anxiety reduces the ability to recall events, we should ensure that potential witnesses are handled sensitively and with care, possibly involving counsellors and thus helping them increase the recall of the event. This means that the research has value in real life and research is beneficial.
• There are ethical issues involved in studying the effects of anxiety on EWT. For example, the research may subject participants to psychological harm, as it would have been quite distressing to watch a man enter the room with a knife. Real-life studies are useful because they do not cause any unnecessary stress as the events have occurred in real life and have not been manipulated. This suggests that it is different to test EWT accurately in the lab.