Chapter 2.8 - Factors affecting EWT: Anxiety Flashcards
What is meant by anxiety?
A state of emotional and physical arousal
- Emotions: worried thoughts and feelings of tension
- Physical: increased heart rate and sweatiness
Describe how anxiety has a negative effect on recall (weapon focus)
Anxiety creates a physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues, so recall is worse
Describe the procedure on the research on how anxiety has a negative effect on recall (weapon focus)
Johnson and Scott (1976):
- Participants believed they were taking part in a lab study
- Low anxiety condition: overheard a casual conversation in the next room, man walked past carrying a pen and with grease on his hands
- High anxiety condition: overheard a heated argument in the next room, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass, man walked out of the room holding a knife covered in blood
Describe the findings on the research on how anxiety has a negative effect on recall (weapon focus)
- Man was picked out from a set of 50 photos, 49% identified pen man, 33% identified knife man
Describe the conclusions on the research on how anxiety has a negative effect on recall (weapon focus)
Tunnel theory of memory: argues that people have enhanced memory for central events
- Weapon focus as a result of anxiety can have this effect
What is a strength of the research on how anxiety has a negative effect on recall? (support for negative effects)
- Valentine and Mesout 2009 found negative effects on recall
- Used an objective measure: heart rate, to divide participants into high and low anxiety groups
- Anxiety clearly disrupted the ability to recall details about the actor in the London Dungeon’s Labyrinth
- High level of anxiety does have a negative effect on the immediate eyewitness recall of a stressful event
What is a limitation of the research on how anxiety has a negative effect on recall? (unusualness not anxiety)
- Research may not have tested anxiety
- Participants focused on the weapon since they were surprised at what they saw rather than scared
- Pickel 1998 conducted an experiment using scissors, a handgun, a wallet or raw chicken as the hand-held items in a video, scissors = high anxiety and low unusualness
- EWA was significantly poorer in the high unusualness conditions (chicken and handgun)
- Suggests that the weapon focus effect is due to the unusualness rather than anxiety/threat
- Tells us nothing specifically about the effects of anxiety on EWT
Describe how anxiety has a positive effect on recall
Witnessing a stressful event creates anxiety through physiological arousal within the body
- Triggers the fight or flight response, increasing alertness
- May improve memory for the event as we become more aware of cues in the situation
Describe the procedure on the research on how anxiety has a positive effect on recall (Yuille and Cutshall 1986)
- Study of an actual shooting in a gun shop in Vancouver, Canada, the shop owner shot a thief dead
- 21 witnesses of which 13 took part in the study
- Interviewed four to five months after the incident and were compared to the original police interviews at the time of the shooting
- Accuracy was determined by the number of details
- Asked to rate their stress at the time of the incident via a 7-point scale and whether they had any emotional problems since the event such as sleeplessness
Describe the findings on the research on how anxiety has a positive effect on recall
- Witnesses were very accurate and there was little change in the recall and accuracy after five months
- However some details were less accurate, such as recollection of the colour of item and age/height/weight estimates
- Participants with the highest levels of stress were 88% accurate compared with 75% accuracy of those with lower levels of stress
Describe the conclusions on the research on how anxiety has a positive effect on recall
This suggests that anxiety does not have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of eyewitness memory in a real-world context and may even enhance it
What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law?
That the inverted-U theory states that performance will increase with stress, but only to a certain point, where it decreases drastically
Explain the contradictory findings
- 21 studies were reviewed in 1983 and noticed contradictory findings on the effects of anxiety
- When witnessing a crime/accident, we become emotionally(anxious) and physically aroused(fight/flight response)
- Lower levels of arousal = lower levels of recall accuracy
- Optimal level of arousal = point of maximum recall accuracy
- Higher levels of arousal than the optimal level = drastic decline in recall accuracy
What is a strength of the research on how anxiety has a positive effect on recall? (support for positive effects)
- 1993 study interviewed 58 witnesses to actual bank robberies in Sweden
- Some were directly involved, bank workers, and some were indirectly involved, bystanders
- Assumed that those directly involved would experience the most anxiety
- Recall was more than 75% accurate across all witnesses
- Direct witnesses were even more accurate, they were the most anxious
- Findings from actual crimes confirms that anxiety does not reduce the accuracy of recall but may enhance it
What is a counterpoint of the research on how anxiety has a positive effect on recall? (support for positive effects)
- 1993 study interviewed their participants several months after the event, 4-15 months
- Lack of control over what happened during the intervening time, PED
- Effects of anxiety may have been overwhelmed by other factors and impossible to assess by the time they were interviewed
- Lack of control over confounding variables may be responsible for these findings, INVALIDATING their support
What is another evaluation of the research on how anxiety has a positive effect on recall? (problems with the inverted-u theory)
- Reasonable explanation of the contradictory findings linking anxiety with both increased and decreased EWR
- Ignores that anxiety has many elements: cognitive, behavioural, emotional, and physical
- Assumes that only emotional and physical arousal is linked to EWT : the way we think about the stressful situation (cognitive) may also be important
