11 - Anxiety and Eyewitness Testimony Flashcards
Define anxiety
State of apprehension, uncertainty, and fear resulting from a threatening situation. It can often impair both physical and psychological functioning.
What is the weapon focus effect?
The presence of a weapon during a crime increases anxiety and could therefore impair witness’ memory of the crime. People who observe a violent crime will often pay attention to the aspect of the situation posing the most threat to them because of their anxiety. This means that witnesses who see a violent crime involving a weapon can often describe a criminals weapon in great detail, but they cannot recall much about the criminals themselves.
Describe an investigation on anxiety affect on a persons ability to recognise the perpetrator of the crime.
Loftus arranged for participants to overhear a heated and hostile argument between two people and the sounds of furniture being overturned and broken glass before a man emerged carrying a letter opener covered in blood. In the control condition participants overheard a conversation between two people about laboratory equipment failure before a man with grease all over his hands emerged carrying a pen.
What were the results of Loftus’s experiment? What was his theory?
The participants were asked to identify the person they had just seen from 50 photos. Only 33% of the participants in the bloody letter opener condition recognised the photo of the person carrying the letter opener whereas 49% of the pen condition recognised him.
Loftus said this happened because people in the former condition had focussed on the bloody letter opener rather than the person carrying it because the letter opener was a weapon that could pose a threat to them.
What are the advantages of the anxiety theory?
Loftus et al got participants to watch one of two films. In the first film, a person pointed a gun at a cashier and received some money, in the second film a person gave a cheque to the cashier in exchange for some money. Participants in the gun condition had a much poorer recall for details of the situation but could describe the gun very accurately.
Loftus and burns allocated participants into one of two conditions. One group watched a violent short film where a boy was shot in the head. The other group watched a non violent film of a crime. PPs were less accurate in recall when they saw the short film with a gun that those who watched a non violent movie.
What are the disadvantages of the anxiety theory?
Psychologists studied 110 people who had witnessed real bad robberies, either as direct victims or bystanders, in Sweden. The victims, who had been subjected to the most anxiety, had more accurate recall than the bystanders. This suggests that the relationship between anxiety and memory is not clear cut - anxiety does not always hinder accurate recall.
Valentine et al conducted a meta-analysis of 300 real line-up identifications to see if the weapon focus effect could be demonstrated using a real crime. They found that the presence of a weapon had no effect on the probability of a correct identification.
Bothwell et al found that ‘neurotic’ individuals ( emotionally sensitive ) had less accurate memory when anxious but ‘stable’ individuals ( not emotionally sensitive ) actually had better memory when anxious. This suggests that individual differences are a factor when considering the effect of anxiety on memory.
The weapon focus effect may not be caused by anxiety but by surprise. Pickle arranged for a thief to enter a hair salon carrying scissors ( high anxiety, low surprise ) , handgun ( high anxiety, high surprise ), wallet ( low anxiety, low surprise) or a whole raw chicken ( low anxiety, high surprise ). Identification of the thief was lowest in the high surprise conditions rather than the high anxiety conditions.
