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Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety (Evaluation (Weapon focus may…
Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety
Keyterms
Anxiety- an unpleasant emotional state that is often accompanied by increased heart rate and rapid breathing, i.e psychological arousal
Effects Of Anxiety
Anxiety has a negative effect on accuracy
Stress has a negative effect on memory as well as performance generally.
Automatic skills are not affected by stress/psychological arousal but performance on complicated cognitive tasks is reduced by stress.
Key study: Johnson and Scott (1976)
Procedure
Johnson and Scott asked participants to sit in a waiting room and heard an argument in another room and see a man run through the room carrying either a pen covered in grease (low anxiety condition) or a knife covered in blood (high anxiety, 'weapon focus' condition). Then ppts were asked to find them from photos.
Findings
Mean accuracy was 49% in identifying the man in the pen condition, compared with 33% accuracy in the knife condition.
Loftus et al. (1987) showed that anxiety does focus attention on central features of a crime. Mostly on the weapon.
Anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy
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.
Christianson and Hubinette (1993) found evidence of enhanced recall when they questioned 58 real witenesses to bank robberies in Sweden. The witnesses were either victims or bystander, i.e. high and low anxiety respectively. The interviews were conducted 4-15 months after the robberies.
75% accurate recall
Resolving the contradiction
Kenneth Deffenbacher (1983) reviewed 21 studies of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness memory. 10 of these studies had results that linked higher arousal levels to increased eyewitness while 11 of them showed the opposite.
Evaluation
Weapon focus may not be caued by anxiety
Real life versus lab studies
No simple conclusion
Individual differences
An alternative model