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factors affecting eyewitness testimony - Coggle Diagram
factors affecting eyewitness testimony
anxiety
has strong emotional and physical effects
Johnson and Scott
they show that anxiety has a negative effect on recall - high anxiety led to less accurate recall due to the tunnel theory of memory
procedure - led participants to believe that they were taking part in a lab study, in the waiting room they heard an argument in the next room.
low anxiety condition
- man walked through waiting area carrying a pen with grease on his hands,
high anxiety condition
- heated argument accompanied by sound of breaking glass, man walked about carrying paper knife cover in blood
findings - participants picked out a man from a set of 50 photos
low anxiety
- 49% able to identify,
high anxiety
- 33% able to identify
tunnel theory - witnesses attention narrows to focus on the weapon because of anxiety - making them less able to pick out the perpetrator
Yuille and Cutshall
show that anxiety has a positive effect on recall - high anxiety is associated with better recall when witnessing a real crime shooting. this triggers the fight or flight system, increasing alertness to improve EWT
procedure - real life shooting in a gun shop in vancouver. the shop owner shot the their dead. there were 21 witnesses and 13 agreed to take part. interviews were conducted 4-5 months after event and were compared with police interviews. accuracy was determined by the number of details reported in each account. they were also asked to rate how they had felt at the time of the incident
findings - the witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in the accuracy after 5 months (compared with police records)
the participants who reported the highest levels of anxiety were the most accurate 88% compared to 75% for the less stressed group
Yerkes and Dodson law
states the relationship between emotional arousal and performance
it suggests that you reach peak performance with an intermediate level of stress. too much or too little arousal results in poorer performance. performance will increase to a peak level with stress but only to a certain point where functioning will decrease drastically
evaluation
limitation - the study by Johnson and Scott may test surprise rather than anxiety. participants may focus on the weapon because of surprise and Pickel conducted an experiment and found eye witness accuracy was significantly poorer in high unusualness conditions. this suggests that weapon focus effect is due to unusualness rather than anxiety
limitation - Yuille and Cutshalls research may be affected by extraneous variables since it was a real life event. participants may have read accounts in the media and more. this is a limitation because it is possible that these extraneous variables may be responsible for the accuracy of recall
limitation - anxiety is difficult to define and measure accurately. it has many elements such as cognitive, behavioural, emotional and physical. the inverted U explanation only focuses on the physiological aspects of anxiety. this therefore decreases validity
limitation - creating anxiety is risky. it can subject people to psychological harm purely for the purpose of research. real life studies are very beneficial as psychologists don't need to recreate it so there are no ethical issues