Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony: Anxiety Flashcards
Anxiety definition
An unpleasant emotional state that is often accompanied by increased heart rate and rapid breathing
3 AO1 points
Negative effects on accuracy
Positive effect on accuracy
York’s-Dodson
Negative effects on accuracy
Anxiety may have negative effects on recall and the accuracy of EWT due to the weapon focus effect
WFE tends to happen during the commission of a crime in which a weapon is used:
- May fixate on the weapon due to fear or the fight-or-flight response etc.
-due to this intense focus on the weapon, the person wielding it is not really noticed (the eyewitness does not take in their height, hair colour etc.)
-thus, recall of the details of the perpetrator is virtually non-existent
Negative effects on accuracy: Key study
Johnson & Scott
Proc: Participants were told they were taking part in a lab study and were asked to sit down in a waiting area
Participants were split into a low-anxiety group or a high-anxiety group
While the participants were in the waiting area they witnessed one of the following:
Low-anxiety group overheard a casual conversation from a room and saw a man walk out with a pen and grease on his hands
High-anxiety group overheard an argument from the room and saw a man walk out with a knife and blood on his hands
Participants were asked to identify the man from a set of photographs
Findings:
The low-anxiety group correctly identified the man with a mean accuracy of 49%
Accuracy dropped to 33% in the high-anxiety group
The researchers concluded that anxiety focuses attention on the weapon and away from other details of the event
Positive effects of anxiety on accuracy
Anxiety may have a positive effect on the recall of events during a stressful situation
This positive effect may be due to an increase in the hormone adrenaline which triggers the ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response which results in a state of high alertness
Evolutionary argument: suggests it would be adaptive to remember events that are emotionally important so that you could identify similar situations in the future and recall how to respond - such as what you did last time when you escaped from a lion.
Positive effects of anxiety on accuracy: key study
Christianson and Hubinette:
Found evidence of enhanced recall when they questioned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies in Sweden.
The witnesses were either victims (bank teller) or bystanders (employee or customer), ie. high and low anxiety respectively. The interviews were conducted 4-15 months after the robberies.
The researchers found that all witnesses showed generally good memories for details of the robbery itself (better than 75% accurate recall)
Those witnesses who were most anxious (the victims) had the best recall of all. This study generally shows that anxiety does not reduce accuracy of recall.
Christianson (1992), in a review of research, concluded that memory for negative emotional events is better than for neutral events, at least for the central details.
Yerkes-Dodson
According to this principle there would be occasions when anxiety/arousal is only moderate and then eyewitness accuracy would be enhanced. When anxiety/arousal is too extreme then accuracy will be reduced
AO3:
lim: wfe may not be anxiety
str: real-life studies
lim: indiv diffs
lim: Yerkes-dodson too simple
lim:wfe may not be anxiety
Pickel: proposed that the reduced accuracy of identification could be due to surprise rather than anxiety.
To test this she arranged for participants to watch a thief enter a hairdressing salon carrying:
Scissors (high threat, low surprise),
Handgun (high threat, high surprise),
Wallet (low threat, low surprise)
or a whole raw chicken (low threat, high surprise).
Identification was least accurate in the high surprise conditions rather than high threat.
This supports the view that the weapon focus effect is related to surprise rather than anxiety.
str: real-life studies
One of the strengths of the study by Christianson and Hubinette was that it was a study of anxiety in the context of a real crime.
It may well be the case that lab studies do not create the real levels of anxiety experienced by a real eyewitness during an actual crime.
Deffenbacher et al: agree with this but found, from a review of 34 studies, that lab studies in general demonstrate that anxiety leads to reduced accuracy and that real-life studies are associated with an even greater loss in accuracy.
These findings are at odds with the result from Christianson and Hubinette, but suggest that the results from lab studies are valid, as they are supported by most real-life studies.
lim: indiv diffs
One key extraneous variable in many studies of anxiety is emotional sensitivity.
In a study by Bothwell: participants were tested for personality characteristics and were labelled as either ‘neurotic’ (tend to become anxious quickly) or ‘stable’ (less emotionally sensitive).
It was found that the ‘stable participants showed rising levels of accuracy as stress levels increased, whereas the opposite was true for neurotics - their accuracy levels decreased as stress increased.
Deffenbacher: point out that the modest effect sizes shown in many studies of anxiety may be the result of averaging out low accuracy and high accuracy scores of sensitive and non-sensitive participants respectively.
These studies suggest that individual differences may indeed play an important role in the accuracy of EWT.
lim: Yerkes-dodson too simple
Fazey and Hardy: suggested a more complex relationship between anxiety and performance than the Yerkes-Dodson model.
Their catastrophe theory predicts that when physiological arousal increases beyond the optimum level, the inverted-U hypothesis predicts a gradual decrease in performance.
Takes into account: cognitive anxiety, performance, self-confidence, psychological arousal
However, Fazey and Hardy observed that in fact there is sometimes a catastrophic decline, which they suggest is due to increased mental anxiety (worry) - the inverted U only describes increases in physiological anxiety
This therefore suggests an alternative model, one that Deffenbacher believe fits better with research findings, especially those of real-life eyewitnesses.
