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Effects of Anxiety on eyewitness testimony. - Coggle Diagram
Effects of Anxiety on eyewitness testimony.
Anxiety
Feeling of unease, such as worry or fear.
Tends to be accompanied by physiological arousal.
Remains unclear as whether the effect on memory is positive or negative.
Weapon focus effect.
The anxiety of seeing a weapon focuses all attention on the weapon and away from other aspects of the situation.
Effecting memory.
EWT is less accurate for all aspects of the situation except the weapon.
Tunnel theory of memory
In stressful situations, our attentions narrows to focus on one aspect of a situation.
Makes EWT less accurate.
Johnson and Scott 1976.
Procedure:
They asked 48 undergrad students to sit in a waiting room where they heard an argument in another room.
Then they saw a man running out of the room.
One condition the man runs out with a pen covered in grease. This is the low anxiety condition.
In the other condition the man runs out with a knife covered in blood. This is a high anxiety condition.
The participants were later asked to identify the man from a set of photos.
Findings:
Mean accuracy was 49% in pen condition.
Mean accuracy in knife condition was 33%.
Supports weapon focus effect.
Loftus et al 1987.
Shows that anxiety does focus attention on central features of the crime ie: the weapon.
During this study they monitored the eye movement on the participants.
They found that the presence of the weapon caused the most attention.
Mini evaluation.
G
: 48 white undergraduate students, lack representation.
R
: Replicable as it was in a controlled lab setting.
A
: Highlighted the need for police/courts to be aware of the weapon focus effect.
V
: Lacks ecological validity - may have anticipated something was going to happen. Meaning, it is very artificial.
E
: Participants were deceived about the nature of the experiment, not protected from harm.
Anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy.
Yuille and Cutshall 1986.
Procedure:
Conducted a study of an actual shooting in a gun shoot.
The shop owner shot a thief dead.
There was 21 witnesses but 13 took part.
They were interviewed four to five months after the incident.
The study interviews were compared to the study police interviews.
The witnesses were asked to rate how stressed they felt on a 7 point scale and whether they had emotional problems since.
Findings:
The witnesses who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate.
This suggests that anxiety does not have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of eyewitness memory in a real world context and may even enhance it.
Deffenbacher 1983,
He reviewed 21 studies of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness memory.
10 of the studies had results that linked higher arousal levels to increased eyewitness accuracy while 11 of them showed the opposite.
He suggested that the Yerkes-Dodson effect can explain for inconsistency in results.
The observation that arousal has a negative effect on performance such as memory recall when it is very low or very high, but moderate levels are actually beneficial.
This is described as an inverted U shape curve.