Accuracy Of Eyewitness Testimony: Anxiety Flashcards
What is anxiety?
An unpleasant emotional state that is often accompanied by increased heart rate and rapid breathing, i.e. physiological arousal
How does anxiety have a negative effect on accuracy?
Stress and anxiety has a negative effect on memory as well as performance generally.
Automatic skills are not affected by stress/physiological arousal but performance on complicated cognitive tasks is reduced by stress.
Who conducted a key study?
Johnson and Scott - 1976
What was Johnson and Scotts study on?
The weapon focus effect
What is the weapon focus effect?
The view that a weapon in a criminals hand distracts attention (because of anxiety it creates) from other features and therefore reduces the accuracy of identification.
What was Johnson and Scott’s procedure?
To test the effect, they asked participants to sit in a waiting room where they heard an argument in an adjoining room and then saw a man run through the room carrying either a pen covered in grease (low anxiety condition) or a knife covered in blood (high anxiety, ‘weapon focus’ condition).
Participants were later asked to identify the man from a set of photographs.
What was Johnson and Scott’s findings?
They supported the idea of the weapon focus effect.
Mean accuracy was 49% in identifying the man in the pen condition, compared with 33% accuracy in the knife condition.
What did Loftus find?
Loftus (1987) showed that anxiety does focus attention on central features of a crime (e.g. the weapon).
The researchers monitored eyewitnesses’ eye movements and found that the presence of a weapon caused attention to be physically drawn towards the weapon itself and away from other things such as the persons face.
How can anxiety have a positive effect on accuracy?
There is an alternative argument that says high anxiety/arousal creates more enduring and accurate memories.
For example, there is an evolutionary argument that suggests it would be adaptive to remember events that are emotionally important so that you could identify similar situations in the future and recall how to respond - such as what you did last time when you escaped from a lion.
What did Christianson and Hubinette find?
1993 - found evidence of enhanced recall when they questioned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies in Sweden.
The witnesses were either victims (bank teller) or bystanders (employee or customer), i.e. high and low anxiety respectively.
The interviews were conducted 4-15 months after the robberies.
They found that all witnesses showed generally good memories for details of the robbery itself (better than 75% accurate recall). Those witnesses who went most anxious (the victims) had the best recall of all.
This study generally shows that anxiety does not reduce accuracy of recall.
What did Christianson concluded in a review of research?
1992 - in a review of research, concluded that memory for negative emotional events is better than for neutral events, at least for the central details.
What did Deffenbacher (1983) find?
Reviewed 21 studies of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness memory.
He found that 10 of these studies has results that linked higher arousal levels to increased eyewitness accuracy while 11 of them showed the opposite.
What did Deffenbacher suggest about the findings?
That the Yerkes-Dodson effect can account for this apparent inconsistency.
According to this principle there would be occasions when anxiety/arousal is only moderate and then eyewitness accuracy would be enhanced. When it’s too extreme then accuracy will be reduced.
What is the Yerkes-Dodson effect?
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.
— basically the inverted U theory.
What are the evaluative points?
Weapon focus may not be caused by anxiety Real life versus lab studies No simple conclusion Individual differences An alternative model
