Factors affecting eyewitness testimony:Anxiety

Question 1

Define Anxiety (3)

Answer 1

*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.

Question 2

Why does anxiety have a negative effect on recall?

Answer 2

*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.

Question 3

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

Weapon focus effect

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

A real life study on health care patients (3)

Answer 4

• 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

Question 5

Valentine and Mesout et al (2009)
(5)

Answer 5

• 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.

Question 6

Positive effects of anxiety(3)

Shooting 13 people

Answer 6

• 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

Question 7

Explaining the contradictory findings (8)

The graph

Answer 7

• 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