Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety Flashcards
What causes a negative effect on memory?
Stress ( and anxiety)
Which skills are not affected by stress/physiolocial arousal?
Automatic
Key Study:
Johnson and Scott (1976)
Where did participants sit for the experiment?
In a waiting room
Key Study:
Johnson and Scott (1976)
What did participants hear?
An argument in a adjoining room
Key Study:
Johnson and Scott (1976)
What was the independent varibale?
A man running through the room with:
- A greasy pen
or
- A knife covered in blood
Key Study:
Johnson and Scott (1976)
What were participants asked to do later on in the experiment?
Identify the man from a set of photographs
Key Study:
Johnson and Scott (1976)
What did the fings support?
The idea of the weapon focus effect
Key Study:
Johnson and Scott (1976)
What was the mean accuracy for the man with the pen condition?
49%
Key Study:
Johnson and Scott (1976)
What was the mean accuracy in the knife condition?
33%
Key Study:
Johnson and Scott (1976)
What did Loftus et al (1987) show?
That anxiety does focus attention on the central features of a crime
( eg the weapon)
What is the alternative arguement to Johnson and Scott?
That high anxiety/arousal creates more enduring and accurate memories
What does the evolutionary argument suggest?
It would adaptive to remember events that are emotionally so that you could identify similar situations in the future and recall how ro respond
What did Christianson and Hubinette (1993) find evidence for?
Enhanced recall
How did Christianson and Hubinette (1993) test their theory?
They questionned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies in Sweden
What was the independent variable for Christianson and Hubinette (1993)?
Witnesses were either
- Victims ( bank teller)
or
- Bystanders ( employee or customer)
What Christianson and Hubinette (1993) find about all witnesses memories?
Good memories for detail
better than 75% accurate recall
Which witnesses had the best recall?
Christianson and Hubinette (1993)
The victims
bank tellers
Who resolved the contradiction?
Kenneth Deffenbacher ( 1983)
What did Kenneth Deffenbacher ( 1983) do to resolve?
Reviewed 21 of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness memory
What did Kenneth Deffenbacher ( 1983) find about the studies?
10 of these studies had results that linked higher arousal levels increased eyewitness accuracy while 11 showed the opposite
Weapon focus may not be caused by anxiety
A criticism of the weapon focus
- Pickel (1998), reduced accuracy of identification could be due to surprise rather than anxiety
> To test this participants watched a theif enter a hairdressing salon with:
> Scissors ( high threat, low surprise)
> Handgun ( high threat, high surprise)
> Wallet ( low threat, low surprise)
> A whole raw chicken ( low threat, high surprise)
Identification was least accurate in the high surprise conditions rather than high threat
Real life versus lab studies
One of the strengths of Christianson and Hubinette was that it was a real crime study
- It may be that lab studies do not create the real levels of anxiety
- Deffenbacher et al. ( 2004) agree with this but found,
> Lab studies in general show that anxiety leads to reduced accuracy and that real-life studies are associated with an even greater loss in accuracy
Results from lab studies are valide, as they are supported by real-life
Individual differences
Key extraneous variabkes in many studies of anxiety is emotionsal sensitivity
- Bothwell et al. (1987) participants were tested for personality characteristics and were labelled as either ‘neurotic’ (tend to be anxious quickly) or ‘stable’
- Stable participants showed rising levels of accuracy as stress levels increased
- Deffenbacher et al. (2004) the modest effect sizes shown in many studies of anxiety may be the result if averaging out low accuracy and high accuracy scores of sensitive and non-sensitive participants respectively
Suggest that individual differences may indeed play an important role in the accuracy of EWT
