anxiety Flashcards
How does anxiety affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony?
People often become anxious when they are in stressful situations, and this anxiety tends to be accompanied by physiological arousal i.e. shallow breathing.
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is a physiological response to external pressures, characterised by an increased heart rate and sweat production etc. It can have either a positive or negative effect on the accuracy of EWT.
What key study states that anxiety has a negative effect on accuracy, and why?
Johnson and Scott 1976, due to the weapon focus effect; the view that a weapon in a criminal’s hand distracts attention from other features and therefore reduces the accuracy of identification.
The procedure of Johnson and Scott’s 1976 study.
Participants sat in a waiting room hearing an argument in an adjoining room. A man ran 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.
The findings of Johnson and Scott’s 1976 study.
The findings 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.
Loftus et al 1987 showed that anxiety does focus attention on central features of a crime.
Who says that anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy, and why?
Christianson and Hubinette 1993 found evidence of enhanced recall when they questioned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies in Sweden.
Witnesses were either victims or bystanders i.e. high and low anxiety respectively. The interviews were conducted 4-15 months after the robberies.
Findings of Christianson and Hubinette 1993.
All witnesses showed generally good memories for details of the robbery itself.
Those witnesses who were most anxious had the best recall of all and generally shows that anxiety does not reduce accuracy of recall.
How can we resolve the contradiction of whether anxiety has a positive or negative effect on accuracy?
Deffenbacher suggested that Yerkes-Dodson effect can account for this apparent inconsistency. According, there would be occasions when anxiety/arousal is only moderate and then eyewitness accuracy would be enhanced. When anxiety is too extreme then accuracy will be reduced.
What does Yerkes-Dodson suggest?
Arousal has a negative effect on performance when it is very low or very high, but moderate levels are actually beneficial; inverted U-shape curve.
Evaluation points for anxiety.
Lack internal validity; weapon focus caused by surprise.
Individual differences.
Lack internal validity.
Researchers may not be testing anxiety, but instead, may be testing surprise. Evident in Pickel 1998, who proposed that the reduced accuracy of identification could be due to surprise rather than anxiety.
Pickel 1998.
Identification was least accurate in the high surprise conditions rather than high threat.
Participants watched a thief entering a salon carrying i.e. a whole raw chicken (low threat, high surprise) and a wallet (low threat, low surprise). etc.
Individual differences.
It has been suggested that one key extraneous variable in many studies of anxiety is emotional sensitivity.
Bothwell et al. participants were tested for personality characteristics and were labelled as either neurotic (tend to become anxious quickly) or stable (less emotionally sensitive).
Findings of Bothwell et al
It was found that the stable participants showed rising levels of accuracy as stress levels increased, whereas the opposite was true for neurotics- their accuracy levels decreased as stress increased.
