ewt anxiety

Question 1

effects of anxiety

Answer 1

• emotional and physical effecets
• unclear whether it makes ewt worse/better

research supports both

Question 2

anxiety - negative effect - weapon focus

Answer 2

• anxiety= increases psychological arousal, makes harder to pay attention o important details = neg impact ewt

Question 3

anxiety - negative effect - procedure

Answer 3

Craig Johnson and William Scott 1976

• thought they were taking part in lab study

low anxiety condition -
- heard casual convo
- man walked past carrying pen with grease on his hands

high anxiety conditions -
- ppts heard heated argument and breaking glass
- man walked out holding knife covered in blood

Question 4

anxiety - negative effect - findings

Answer 4

ppts asked to identify man from 50 phoots

low anx- 49% correctly identified
high anx - 33% correctly identified

tunnel theory of memory - ppl focus on central events e.g weapon at the cost of other details

Question 5

anxiety - positive effect

Answer 5

• wit stressful event - triggers psycholigcal arousal
• increases alertness, improves memory

Question 6

anxiety - positive effect, procedure

Answer 6

John yullie and Judith cutshall 1986
- examined actual shooting in gun shop, Vancouver
- 21 witnesses, 13 taking part in study
- interviewed for 4-5 months after event, compared to og police interviews
- accuracy measured by number of details reported
-witnsses gave stress level from at time of incident

Question 7

anxiety - positive effect, findings

Answer 7

• gave highly accurate accounts, little change over 5 months
• some details e.g age height weight , less accurate
• pts with higher stress,= best recall

shows = anxiety doesn’t have big effect on ewt, and may even improve ewt

Question 8

CONTRADICITING EVIDENCE

Answer 8

yerkes and Dodson 1908, relationship between emotional arousal and performance, looks like inverted U

Deffenbacher (1983)- found
low arousal = poor performance
moderate arousal - best
high aroursal - poor

Question 9

limitation , didnt test anxiety

Answer 9

p- may not have tested anxiety

e- ppt may have focused on knife, bc surprised, not bc they were anxious/scared

e- pickel 1998, experiment , using diff hand held items in hair dressing salon , e.g scissors, gun, raw chicken, ewt, poorer in unusualness conditions e.g chicken/gun, not bc of anxiety, bc they were unusual objects

l- = focus on weapon , bc on unusualness, rather than anxiety, SO , doesn’t give clear evidence on how anxiety impacts ewt