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Eyewitness Testimony - Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness…
Eyewitness Testimony - Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony - Anxiety
A main criticism of EWT studies is that it often uses artificial stimuli that have no emotional involvement for witnesses. Real life events however , such as violent crimes , often have a high anxiety content that can greatly affect recall
Anxiety may divert attention away from the important aspects of an event being witnessed
Loftus et al (1987) argued for a weapon effect, whereby witnesses to violent crimes focus on the weapon being used, rather than the culprits face, negatively affecting the ability to recall important information
Deffenbacher (1983) used the IUH (originally a description of the relationship between arousal and performance) to explain how anxiety levels affect the accuracy of recall of events experienced
The IUH sees moderate amounts of anxiety as improving the detail and accuracy of recall up to an optimal point, after which further increases in anxiety lead to a decline in the detail and accuracy of recall
The findings of research have been used to investigate whether this is true , though it is difficult to reach any firm conclusions
Repression - Freud (1894) argued that anxiety hinders the recall of memories , as he saw forgetting as being motivated by the traumatic content of memories
Access to memories would be barred , so as to protect individuals from the emotional distress they would cause
Deffenbacher (1983) performed a meta analysis of 21 studies examining the role of anxiety and accuracy of EWT, finding heightened anxiety tended to negatively the memory of eyewitnesses . This suggests that anxiety can divert attention away from important features of a situation
However, Christianson and Hubinette (1993) studied the recall of witnesses to real bank robberies, finding contradictory results, in that increased arousal led to improvements in the accuracy of recall, suggesting that anxiety creating situations don't always divert attention from important features of the situation
Koehler et al (2002) found participants less able to recall stressful words than non stressful words, lending support to freuds concept of repression.
However, Hadley and MacKay (2006) found stressful words were better recalled, as they were more memorable, suggesting repression may occur in some instances but not always
Evaluation
Much research into EWT is lab based so findings can't be generalized to real life scenarios. Yuille and Cutshall ( 1986) investigated the anxiety levels and accuracy of recall of 13 witnesses to a fatal shooting in vancouver, canada , finding that those with high anxiety levels had less accurate recall than those with lower levels , but those who witnessed with very high anxiety had extremely accurate recall , which casts doubt over the inverted U hypothesis
However, Fruzetti et al (1992) point out that those with the highest levels of anxiety were actually closer to events and this may have helped their accuracy of recall
Deffenbacher (2004) reviewed his earlier findings and found them over simplistic. He performed a meta analysis of 63 studies , finding that EWT performance increased gradually up to extremely high levels of anxiety , after which there was a catastrophic drop in performance with a negative impact on both accuracy of eyewitness identification and accuracy of recall of crime related details. This supports an amended version of the IUH known as the catastrophe theory
Care must be taken with studies of anxiety and EWT as by their nature, such studies could produce potentially high levels of psychological harm
Other factors could have a mediating effect on how anxiety affects the accuracy of memory recall, for instance researchers indicate that age can have an affect on EWT accuracy as individuals react differently to anxiety creating situations is highly possible that personality factors would play a mediating role too
