anxiety Flashcards
what’s anxiety
stressful situations which as witnessing a crime or anxiety
anxiety has strong emotional and physical effects but it is not clear wether these effects make ETW worse or better
tunnel theory - weapon focus narrows down to the weapon the source of our anxiety
what’s the experiment where anxiety has a negative effect on EWT
it creates physiological arousal and prevents us paying attention to important cues
procedure - participants lead to believe that they were going to take part in a lab study. in the waiting room they seen a man with either a knife with blood or a pen with grease
they were asked to identify the man and there was better recall when the man had a pen in his hand
this suggests that anxiety can reduce reliability of EWT because of weapon focus affect
what experiment shows that anxiety has a positive effect on EWT
when they took witnesses from an incident where the shopkeeper shot a thief
they compared their interviews from 5 months after to straight after
whose who rated themselves more anxious were more accurate in their recall
this suggests that anxiety increases EWT
what’s the U theory
the U theory is that medium amount of anxiety causes the best recall
what’s problem with the U theory
it only focuses on physical arousal
this is an issue as it ignored the fact that anxiety presents in many different ways for example cognitive
this matter because using the U theory we are oversimplifying the relationship between anxiety and accuracy of EWT
what’s a problem with weapon focus
it’s invalid because of an experiment
when the participant was shown a man walking into a shop with a chicken rather than a weapon accuracy of recall decreased
this suggests that the more unusual the situation the less accurate the recall rather than anxiety or threat
therefore shows that weapon focus is invalid explaination of EWT
