Factors affecting eyewitness testimony:Anxiety Flashcards

1
Q

Define Anxiety (3)

A

*Anxiety refers to the state of emotional and physical arousal.
*The emotions include having worried thoughts and feelings of tension
*The physical changes include an increased heart rate and sweating.

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2
Q

Why does anxiety have a negative effect on recall?

A

*Anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues,
* so recall is worse.
* One approach to studying anxiety and Eyewitness testimony(EWT) has been to look at the effect of weapons on accuracy of recall of the witness.

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3
Q

What study proves that anxiety has negative effect on recall (6)

Weapon focus effect

A
  • Johnson and Scott (1976) participants were placed outside a lab, listening to conversations.
  • 1) normal conversation about equipment failure, man walks out with greasy hands and a pen or
  • 2) Hostile,breaking glass, furniture knocked over . Man walks out with a knife covered in blood.
  • Then asked to identify the man from 50 photos coming out of the lab .
  • It was found more ppts identified a man with a pen (49%) than knife (33%).
  • This suggests Anxiety is caused by a knife resulting in a decreased focus on the mans face and more on the weapon-Weapons focus effect
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4
Q

A real life study on health care patients (3)

A
  • Peters (1988) Patients at a real health care centre were given a real injection by a nurse, with a researcher also present in the room.
  • It was found that the patients were better able to recognise the researcher than the nurse.
  • This suggests anxiety is caused by having an injection and there is a weapon focus on the syringe
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5
Q

Valentine and Mesout et al (2009)
(5)

A
  • One strength is evidence supporting the view that anxiety has a negative effect on the accuracy of recall.
  • The study by valentine and Mesout (2009) supports the research on weapon focus, finding negative effects on recall.
  • The researchers used an objective measure (heart rate) to divide participants into high and low anxiety groups.
  • In this study anxiety clearly disrupted the participants ability to recall details about the actor in London Dungeon’s Labyrinth.
  • This suggests that a high level of anxiety does have a negative effect on the immediate eyewitness recall of a stressful event.
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6
Q

Positive effects of anxiety(3)

Shooting 13 people

A
  • Yuille and Cutshall(1986) interviewed 13 witnesses to a deadly shooting for months after the event.
  • It was found that witnesses resisted misleading information and those with the most stress produced the most accurate EWT.
  • This suggests misleading information and anxiety may not be a significant problem for real world eye witness testimony
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7
Q

Explaining the contradictory findings (8)

The graph

A
  • The stress of witnessing a crime or accident creates anxiety through physiological arousal within the body.
  • The fight or flight response is triggered which increases our alertness and improves our memory for the event because we become more aware of cues in the situation
  • According to Yerkes and Dodson (1908) The relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an inverted U.
  • Lower levels of anxiety produce lower levels of recall accuracy.
  • But memory becomes more accurate as the level of anxiety experienced increases.
  • However, there comes a point where the optimal level of anxiety is reached.
  • This is the point of maximum accuracy.
  • If an eyewitness experiences any more stress than this then their recall of the event suffers a drastic decrease
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