EWT: Anxiety eval Flashcards
Ethical issues
Creating anxiety in ppts is risky because of the psychological harm. Therefore field experiments and natural experiments are better as these people have already experienced anxiety. As a result Johnson and Scott’s research has not taken into account ethical issues and should give their ppts counselling if needed. However this does not challenge their findings.
Field studies lack control
Interviewing real life eyewitnesses may make the research less valid. this is because all sorts of things may have happened to the ppts which the researcher has no control over such as discussions with other people or even media influences. Therefore there are limitations as there might be extraneous variables which effect accuracy of recall.
Weapon focus effect may not be relevant
Weapon focus may because of surprise rather than anxiety. Pickel conducted exp using scissors, handgun, wallet or a raw chicken as hand held in hairdressing salon video. Scissors would be low anxiety, low unusualness. EW accuracy was poorer in high unusualness condition (chicken and handgun). Limitation as it shows that weapon focus= surprise and not due to anxiety so anxiety may not have effect on EWT.
Individual differences
One key extraneous variable in many studies of anxiety is emotional sensitivity. Bothwell et al tested ppts personality characteristics and were labelled as either neurotic or stable. found that stable ppts showed rising levels of accuracy as stress increased whereas it was opposite of the neurotics- accuracy deceased as stress increased.Limitation as Deffenbacher argues that many studies may have been due to those who have low and high emotional sensitivity so we results may not be valid and universal.
Inverted U explanation is too simplistic
Anxiety is difficult to define and measure accurately because it has many elements. (cognitive, behavioural , emotional and physical. But Inverted U only talks about physical arousal and ignore many others. For example cognitive factors may play a huge role in arousal as you may appear to be anxious but you still think about it.
