Factors affecting eyewitness testimony:Anxiety Flashcards
Define Anxiety (3)
*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.
Why does anxiety have a negative effect on recall?
*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.
What study proves that anxiety has negative effect on recall (6)
Weapon focus effect
- 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
A real life study on health care patients (3)
- 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
Valentine and Mesout et al (2009)
(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.
Positive effects of anxiety(3)
Shooting 13 people
- 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
Explaining the contradictory findings (8)
The graph
- 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