Factors in EWT: Anxiety Flashcards
What is the effect anxiety has on recall?
Anxiety has 2 known affects on recall, both with research to support this: positive effect as seen by Yuille and Cutshalls study and a negative effect as seen by Johnson and Scott’s study.
What was the study done showing anxiety had a negative effect on recall?
Jhonson and Scott’s false ‘lab’ study pushes the tunnel theory and the issue of weapon focus as they created 2 anxiety conditions: high-where the person ran out of the room holding a bloody paper knife and low- where they were holding a pen covered in grease. In terms of 50 photos, 49% accurately recalled the man in the low anxiety condition with the pen vs 33% for the high anxiety condition with the knife.
What was the study done showing that anxiety had a positive effect on recall?
Yuille and Cutshall did a study of a real-life gun shooting in Vancoover where 13 out of 13 witnesses agreed to part-take, and their police interview was compared with this one done 4-5 months later, those who gave the highest stress level were the most accurate (88% vs 75% for the less stressed group).
How are the contrary findings explained?
Yerks and Dodson law states that as anxiety lowers, so do the recall levels, but there is an optimum level of anxiety where recall is at maximum level and if anxiety levels increase further than this then the recall level drastically declines.
What is the evaluation of anxiety being a factor of EWT?
Field studies sometimes lack control - all these real-life studies were done after the occurrence of the event, in this time extraneous variables like P.E.Ds could have created an impact in the findings. Low validity.
Ethical issues- causing anxiety in participants is dangerous as it can cause psychological harm, but benefits may outweigh issues as its a real life study and allows comparison with less realistic controlled lab studies.
Inverted-U explanation is way too simplistic- anxiety is too hard to measure, only blaming psychological arousal on being the reason for poor recall when axiety involves behaviour, emotional cognitive etc factors.
