Anxiety and Eye Witness Testimony

Question 1

What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law?

Answer 1

• Relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an inverted ‘U’
• Performance will increase with stress, but only to a certain point, where it decreases drastically

Question 2

What is Anxiety and what can it cause?

Answer 2

• Anxiety is a state of apprehension, uncertainty and fear resulting from a threatening situation
• When anxiety is high it can cause an impairment in both physical and psychological functioning

Question 3

What is the Weapon Focus Effect?

Answer 3

• Presence of a weapon can increase anxiety and impair a witnesses’ memory of a crime
• People are more likely to pay attention to the most anxiety inducing thing when viewing a crime, e.g the weapon
• This means in a violent crime people are more likely to describe the weapon in great detail but not the actual criminal themselves

Question 4

Who did research into the Weapon Focus Effect and outline the prodcedure

Answer 4

Johnson and Scott (1976) -
- Participants sat outside a lab and heard either one of two situations:
- A friendly conversation followed by a man carrying a pen with grease on his hands (low anxiety)
- An argument, with smashing glass and overturned furniture followed by a man emerging with a blood stained paper knife (high anxiety)
- PP’s then asked to identify the man from 50 photos

Question 5

What were the findings from Johnson and Scotts study?

Answer 5

• Witnesses were 49% accurate at identifying the man with the pen, only 33% accurate with the man with the knife
• High anxiety led the focus away from the mans face and onto the weapon, this could apply in real life to real crimes.

Question 6

Strengths supporting Anxiety and EWT?

Answer 6

Research support
- Loftus and Burns (1982)
- One group of pp’s watched a violent short film where a boy was shot in the head whilst the others watched a non-violent crime
- PP’s were less accurate in recall when watching the violent movie with a gun rather than the non-violent film, supporting the weapon focus effect.

Question 7

Weaknesses for Anxiety and EWT?

Answer 7

Ethical issues
Lacks ecological validity
Anxiety different in real life and lab
Individual differences

Question 8

Ethical issues (-)

Answer 8

• Study violated numerous ethical guidelines, pp’s were deceived of the nature of the experiment and not protected from psychological harm
• They were exposed to a man they could have believed just killed someone, this could cause extreme distress if they knew someone involved in knife crime

Question 9

Lacks ecological validity (-)

Answer 9

They were outside a lab, they could have anticipated something happening and this could’ve affected the accuracy of their judgements and as a result the validity of the study

Question 10

Anxiety is different in real life than a lab

Answer 10

People able to recall more in real life situations compared to a lab, less affected by leading questions and distressed individuals gave the most accurate accounts

Question 11

Individual Differences

Answer 11

• Used 110 real life eyewitnesses who saw one of 22 bank robberies
• Some were onlookers and some were bank clerks who were directly threatened
• Victims were more accurate than the onlookers, weapon focus effect did not take place